NOTES: JUNE 2023

Where is Camp Lehigh?

As noted previously, Camp Lehigh has been assigned a retroactive location of Virginia, but when that happened is hard to pin down-- the earliest citation on the Marvel Comics Wiki is Captain America: White in 2008, which is recent enough that I'm surprised that the MCU location of New Jersey didn't take precedence when the 2011 movie came out. Was it in fact established earlier? More notes follow:

-nothing in the various Handbooks of the Marvel Universe

-nor any issues of What If?, which I thought might have added a little detail like that to the scene-setting portion at the beginning of a Cap issue

-various officers stationed at Camp Lehigh are shown to live in NYC

-travel between the camp and NYC is frequent and speedy. Bucky's class visits New York Harbor on a lark

-BUT Captain America Comics 006 places Camp Lehigh within a similar distance of San Francisco, leading me to conclude that it's the Brigadoon of army camps, popping up where it's needed.

At this point I guess it's just a matter of watching out for the word "Virginia" to be explicitly written next to the words "Camp Lehigh" because that's all we can really hold onto.

EDIT: A late addition to the fun confusion: Captain America Comics 009 introduces "Lehigh City" as the nearby urban area that Cap and Bucky visit and it's clearly one of your classic NYC stand-ins, down to the lions on the Lehigh Public Library:

NOTES - FEBRUARY 2023

The Whip is an okay character aside from the brownface bit but one thing I absolutely love about him is that although he does a credible job at the Ineffectual Secret Identity act he also just travels from town to town with an enormous black horse.

(Flash Comics v1 005, 1940) 

Names:

This old dude shares his name with Kurt Busiek's Astro City character Samaritan! The tally of comics characters named Asa Martin stands at 2! (Flash Comics v1 010, 1940)

Same issue's Hawkman story features a (bad) guy named John Denver!

I'm usually pretty good at catching allusions and so forth in these old comics but I have no idea why Joe Magee = "always bungling something" (Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

Places: It's a bit hard to make out but the flash on this armoured car seems to place Seguro in "New Texirona" rather than New Mexico, which might just be the most egregious example of 40s comics writers avoiding real place names that I've ever encountered. (Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

This is how I order in restaurants, too. (Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

Number of references to "the Third Degree" aka the cops torturing someone as a positive thing this month: 3

NOTES - SEPTEMBER 2022

Places: 

The Chandler Building, seen here, is "half a mile high". In other words, about the same height as the Burj Khalifa! What a win for not-yet-Fawcett-City-but-not-quite-New-York-City! Even if the top does get blown off in this story! (Captain Marvel Adventures 003, 1941)

Decoration:

Really really excellent custom motivational poster hanging in Dr Sivana's hideout. (Captain Marvel Adventures 005, 1941)

WWI vets: Richard "Madam Fatal" Stanton (Crack Comics 002, 1940)