Jeffrey Mace

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Patriot

Detail from cover of Marvel Premiere #30 (June 1976)
Art by Jack Kirby & Frank Giacoia

Publisher	Marvel Comics
First appearance	Human Torch Comics # 4
Created by	Ray Gill Bill Everett

Characteristics
Alter ego	Jeffrey Mace
Affiliations	Liberty Legion All-Winners Squad
Notable aliases	Captain America
Abilities	Skilled hand-to-hand combatant and athlete

Jeffrey "Jeff" Mace, also known as Patriot and Captain America, is a fictional superhero in the Marvel Comics universe.

Created by writer Ray Gill and artist Bill Everett, he first appeared in The Human Torch # 4 (Spring 1941; misnumbered #3 on cover) as the Patriot.

In the Modern Age of Comic Books, Marvel revealed via retcon that Mace had become the third Captain America.

[edit] Fictional character biography

Jeffrey Mace was a reporter inspired to become a superhero after seeing Captain America in action. As the Patriot, Mace was one of several superheroes who fought Nazi saboteurs and supervillains during World War II, sometimes alongside sidekick Miss Patriot.

When the Patriot was revived, he was retconned as a member of the 1940s team the Liberty Legion^[1], whose adventures were related in flashback stories. After World War II, Mace continued to fight crime on a regular basis, eventually helping the All-Winners Squad to prevent a young John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination in 1946. The skirmish cost the life of the second Captain America (William Naslund, formerly the Spirit of '76), whom Mace replaced as Captain America until he retired in 1949^[2]. This story was created to help explain the chronological discrepancies between the original Captain being frozen in ice from 1945 until his modern-era revival, and a Captain America appearing in comic books through 1950. (The later, mid-1950s Captain America was yet another person in the role, known only as Grand Director.)

After retiring from heroics, Mace married Betsy Ross, a supporting character from Captain America's early stories who had briefly been the Golden Girl, and died decades later of cancer^[3].

A simulacrum of the Patriot was temporarily created from the mind of Rick Jones, along with those of the Blazing Skull, the Fin, and the Golden Age Angel and Vision, to aid the superhero team the Avengers during the Kree-Skrull War^[4].