Steve Rogers grew up in Brooklyn, a scrawny kid protected from neighborhood bullies by his best friend “Bucky” Barnes. Enlisting around the time the United States entered World War II, Steve voluntarily underwent six months of steroids, surgery, and other experimental treatments supervised by Dr. Erskine, becoming the world’s first genetically-enhanced super-soldier. The authorities seemed unable to replicate the process thereafter. Clad in stars-and-strips military fatigues, he became “Captain America“, his image used to bolster Allied recruiting.

Over the next three years Captain America undertook numerous covert operations, often accompanied by Bucky, now a war photographer, and sometimes alongside Canadian “Lucky” Jim Howlett, who would later become the X-Men Wolverine. In Poland in 1944, he battled Kleiser, one of the Nazi’s secret extraterrestrial Chitauri masters, blowing up a train delivering parts for a super weapon. A year later, he led an assault on an Icelandic base where the Nazis were launching a prototype nuclear bomb at the White House. As the rocket launched, he climbed aboard and wrecked its guidance system, causing it to explode seconds later. Though believed dead, Steve was thrown clear into the icy Arctic Ocean. Rather than dying, he seemingly fell into suspended animation and was found decades later by a team of marine biologists.

Steve awoke in a S.H.I.E.L.D facility, and was soon appointed leader of Ultimates, America’s new superhuman strike force. Struggling to adjust to 21st century life, he helped subdue the rampaging Hulk and attempted to recruit Hawk-Owl, coming to blows with the Chicago vigilante. After teammate Giant Man abused and nearly killed his wife, the Wasp, Steve tracked him down and hospitalized him. When the Chitauri resurfaced, Steve led a successful counterattack during which he duped the Hulk into slaying Kleiser. Soon after this mission, he and the Wasp became a couple.

Captain America has led the Ultimates against the Brotherhood of Mutants, the X-Men, and Norman Osborn‘s group of failed attempts to reproduce the super-soldier process, known as the “Six”. On a Tunguska expedition he learned of a Soviet super-soldier project and fought a man who claimed to be his Russian counterpart. When his former teammate Thor seemingly betrayed the Ultimates, Steve angrily confronted Thor, and later led the team in capturing him. Recently, Captain America was instrumental in the Ultimates forcibly stripping a Middle Eastern country of its nuclear arsenal.