The Real Story Behind That Captain America Shield Colbert Gave Kimmel

Stephen Colbert used a recent Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance to hand off a Captain America shield that had hung behind his desk for two decades, telling the story of Marvel gifting it to him around 2006 as a prop that supposedly dated back to 1960. It made for a fun late-night bit, but former Marvel editor Fabian Nicieza wasted no time complicating the narrative.

According to Nicieza, the shield wasn't a decades-old studio relic at all. It was built in the late '80s or early '90s by Mark Gruenwald, Marvel's legendary editor-in-chief and co-creator of Deadpool, U.S. Agent, and the modern Squadron Supreme, who paid for the materials and made it for his own office out of love for the character he wrote for years. Gruenwald died suddenly in 1996 at age 43, and by Nicieza's account, Marvel never had the right to keep the shield in the first place — it should have gone to his widow, Catherine Gruenwald, decades ago.

Nicieza's read is that Gruenwald "would have loved the journey" the shield has taken through late-night television, even if the company's version of events skipped over who actually made it and why. The story has since prompted renewed attention on getting the shield properly back to the Gruenwald family, a fittingly sentimental coda for a piece Gruenwald built purely because he cared about the character.

Original reporting: Bleeding Cool.