What If...Captain America remained frozen in ice until present day?

Everyone familiar with the character of Captain America knows his story:

Pharmaceutics-enhanced Steve Rogers fought Nazis and evil during World War 2 as the symbol of Liberty, Freedom and the American Dream, Captain America. After foiling a Nazi plot the Captain fell from an exploding rocket into freezing ocean waters where he lapsed into a state of suspended animation. He was rescued years later in the 1960s by the Avengers, thawed out and continued the good fight for several decades.

Yet what would have happened if he was never discovered by the Avengers and continued to drift in a block of ice among the floes and icebergs until present day? The Captain's story would turn out quite differently.

Due to global warming the rapidly melting polar ice caps would partially expose the Captain's body, until now protected deep within in a large block of ice since the final days of World War 2, to the open air and harsh environment. With their sensitive noses, hungry and nomadic polar bears would detect the slumbering hero from miles distant and converge on the site. Using their mighty claws and wicked teeth a polar bear would have little difficulty tearing away the thinning layer of ice covering Captain America and grabbing a filling meal.

Scratch...scratch...scratch...

Wuh? What's that noise? Man, it's cold. Hey, I can't move...

Scratch...scratch...scratch...

Bucky, is that youuuuuuOMIGODAHHHHHHHHHHH...!

Crunch...crunch...crunch...

Bearpocalypse

I see this pulp magazine cover all the time and I didn't really pay attention to it until this morning, ignoring it as just another entry to generic pulp magazine art.

The cover art for the July 1929 Amazing Stories sort of depicts a scene from the Jules Verne story "The Desert of Ice". Then I took a closer look at the painting.

BEARPLOSION!

I'm sorry, but that image is hilarious. None of the bears hurtling skyward seem overly upset over being at the epicenter of a huge detonation of black powder. Two of the bears are tossed up in mid-step (one is upside-down) and are quite nonchalant, another is sniffing around for the abruptly missing ground and another is looking about curiously as if puzzled about the sudden over-abundance of flame. Only one polar bear is hightailing it away from the scene. For all the action they display they could be colorforms of bears stuck on a canvas.

While this cover disconnect isn't as radical as some of the entries from pulps and comic books it does resemble more the illustration and description featuring the active Arctic volcano expelling lava and rocks than the disposal of troublesome, hungry polar bears.


The cover art is kind of an interesting creative mix of the two ideas, probably derived from whatever art instructions or notes were given to the artists.