SPOILER ALERT: THIS POST REVEALS SEVERAL PLOT POINTS IN THE CAPTAIN AMERICA FILM

It’s one thing to take Batman off the comic-book page and make his costume still look good in a live-action feature, but Captain America presents a far bigger challenge — the hero is essentially a walking flag, which might leave many average moviegoers giggling instead of saluting.

But director Joe Johnston and the team at Marvel Studios have a plan for “The First Avenger: Captain America,” which is due in Summer 2011: They’ve added a new wrinkle to the classic mythology to explain why a scientifically enhanced super-soldier would venture out in the WWII battlefields in a costume that leans a bit heavy on the old Betsy Ross imagery.

“The costume is a flag, but the way we’re getting around that is we have Steve Rogers forced into the USO circuit. After he’s made into this super-soldier, they decide they can’t send him into combat and risk him getting killed. He’s the only one and they can’t make more. So they say, ‘You’re going to be in this USO show’ and they give him a flag suit. He can’t wait to get out of it.”

That’s a whole new concept and it’s one that sounds pretty promising. “It was never in the comics,” Johnston said, “because they didn’t really need it. In comics, he puts on the costume and the reader just justifies because of the nature of the medium.”

Johnston told me all this when we sat down for lunch today at the Four Seasons Hotel. For an hour we chatted about his new film, “The Wolfman” (which you can read about next week right here at the Hero Complex) but I had to ask him a bit about the Captain America production.  Filming starts in London at the end of June. “There’s a lot of work we have to do on it,” the 59-year-old director said.

And who will wear the costume and carry the shield? “Well, we’re testing five or six guys,” Johnston said. “The youngest is 23, the oldest is 32. Most of the guys in the war are just kids, 18 or 19, but we want to go a little bit older. We have to have somebody locked in before I leave March 1 for London.”

Read the rest of the article over at  Hero Complex.