Nextwave’s strange and gross secret about Captain America's urine completely redefines his origin story. After being injected by Dr. Abraham Erskine’s Super Solider serum, Steve Rogers was transformed into a living superhuman. When Erskine was tragically killed by Nazi saboteurs shortly after Steve’s transformation, many scientists tried to replicate the experiment that gave the world Captain America. While those experiments typically created supervillains instead of superheroes, Steve Rogers remains an anomaly that is inimitable until Marvel’s Nextwave series.
The short-lived comic series Nextwave by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen followed a group of unlikely and temperamental superheroes employed by the Beyond Corporation, which operates under the guise of an anti-terrorist organization called H.A.T.E. The team is tasked with protecting the world from a variety of strange and powerful threats. When the members of Nextwave realize who their employers are and their true intentions to world, they turn on them, destroying the threats Beyond established all over the planet while also dealing with their own issues and the overall dysfunctional dynamic of the team.
In Nextwave #9, a flashback shows the aftermath of Project: Rebirth, which helped turn the scrawny Steve Rogers into Captain America but at the cost of Dr. Abraham Erskine's life. After showing off his new powers by incapacitating the murderous spy, Steve Rogers's next move is a trip to the bathroom. When he's finished, others are more distracted with him meeting the President or his costume fitting to notice another Nazi spy sneaking into the bathroom, having rigged the toilet for a gross yet sinister purpose. He reveals that Dr. Erskine had died before revealing that the Super Soldier serum would still be present in Rogers' body after the transformation, specifically in his urine.
Erskine takes the secret of the Super Soldier serum with him to the grave, and his death leaves the world with only one Captain America. When Captain America supposedly dies in battle, many scientists try their best to replicate the process or the next best thing, their experiments often creating more problems than solutions. When Steve Rogers returns, he is disappointed to learn that others who attempted to carry the Captain America legacy often ended up unstable supervillains instead of heroes. Although the Nextwave series was later retconned to have taken place in an alternate reality that was nothing more than a playground for the Beyonders, it doesn't make this addition to Captain America's origins any less true despite its gross implications. The Nazi scientist's departure with his special formula is stopped by a mysterious interloper and it's implied that this secondhand formula is later used to create Charlie America, a scrawny yet powerful imitation of Captain America. Charlie is a member of the New Paramounts, faux superheroes made in the Avengers' image created by the Beyond Corporation's agent Number None and who are later sent to fight Nextwave.
Although Charlie America doesn't possess Rogers' impressive physique or iconic shield, he possesses enough power to fight Nextwave's Elsa Bloodstone, temporarily knocking her to the ground. Arrogance proves to be his folly as Elsa Bloodstone takes offense to him calling her a victim, blasting him away with a round from her guns. Although this is the last time readers see Charlie America, it doesn't erase the changes that his creation made to Captain America's origin story, that the secret to more creating Super Soldiers has been inside him all along, though perhaps it's better that secret remains forgotten for now.
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