1792. Captain America

Steve Rogers was a scrawny fine arts student growing up during the Great Depression. His alcoholic father died when Steve was a child, and his mother passed away from pneumonia after he graduated high school. In early 1940, appalled at Nazi Germany’s horrific atrocities, Steve attempted to enlist in the army. Failing to pass physical requirements, he was invited to volunteer for Operation: Rebirth, a project intended to enhance US soldiers to the height of physical perfection via the inventions and discoveries of Professor Abraham Erskine. Rogers eagerly accepted and became the first test subject. After injections and ingestion of the "Super Soldier Serum," Rogers was exposed to a controlled burst of "Vita-Rays" that activated and stabilized the chemicals in his system. The process successfully altered his physiology from its frail state to the maximum of human efficiency, including greatly enhanced musculature and reflexes. Soon after, Professor Erskine was assassinated by a Nazi operative, leaving Steve the sole beneficiary of Erskine’s genius. Renamed “Project: Rebirth,” variations of the Super-Soldier serum were subsequently tested, under inhuman conditions, on African-American soldiers. The most successful of these was Isaiah Bradley, and Project: Rebirth’s resources were eventually absorbed into a multinational superhuman research project dubbed Weapon Plus.

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