Captain America in French Canada

The French-Canadian run of Captain America or "Capitaine America" ran for quite awhile. Starting with issue #1 in 1970 as seen above, the series ran throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s.

Editions Heritage was the publisher for the French-Canadian books. Besides Captain America, they published many more Marvel characters along with some DC and Harvey characters as well. With their Cap series in 1970, they started with some fairly recent stories, perhaps only a year old, rather than the TALES OF SUSPENSE ones.

The EH Cap books contained TWO American issues, obviously translated into French, but in black and white.

Note the stapling and sometimes ragged spine to some of these books. EH would take some of their issues (perhaps issues that did not sell), not always of the same title, and rebind them into a larger jumbo book. This might involve glueing them together at the spine with the new wrap around cover. Rebinding them also meant re-trimming them so sometimes the price and issue number would get sliced off on the right side. Later, especially for reselling on places like eBay, owners would break these jumbo issues apart to resell them as individual issues but you can tell this issues by the spines and cut issue numbers. I'll show some of the Jumbo collections in another post.

Paralleling the English language book, when the Falcon was added to the book and title, so to the French version although the spelling was "Faucon".

On a rare occasion, a different cover was used using interior art from the story as we see below.

More variations on cover art using interior panels below.

Starting after issue #67, they started to give the issues TWO issue numbers since they were reprinting TWO American issues. Sounds like a bit of cheating but they continued this number pattern until the end of the run in the 1980s.

Until the ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN AMERICA volumes catch up, this and the UK Weeklies are great ways to see the Roger Stern/John Byrne Cap run in black and white. For someone like me, I can enjoy and study the inking better without the color.

Finally, the last issue/issues of the series in the mid-1980s with #158/159. I believe they may have gone to color interiors by then.

In all, I feel the French-Canadian Cap line is an impressive run that revivals the lengthy Italian and Brazilian runs in terms of longevity of Cap in other countries. Currently you can still get many of these books easily on eBay.