Issue no. 355 of Captain America (July 1989) opens with Cap sitting in his executive office on Avengers Island where he laments, “Some Avengers leader I turned out to be. Since taking command of this outfit, I’ve been doing as much paperwork as Avenging!”

In the midst of sorting through these tasks, Peggy Carter, the former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who has been assisting the group with administrative duties, informs him of “a call on line seven from a Ms. Bernadette Rosenthal.” Cap agrees to speak with her, although he acknowledges some misgivings. (She is a former girlfriend who had proposed to him before their relationship dissipated.) He had first met her in the guise of his alter ego Steve Rogers, and later endangered her life by revealing his secret identity.

Rosenthal, who subsequently left town to enter law school—years later, she would defend Cap’s former partner, Bucky Barnes, The Winter Solider—reveals that she has contacted him hoping that he could locate her younger sister Nancy, who ran away from home a month earlier. Cap promises to investigate and soon discovers that other teenagers have seemingly disappeared as of late. He decides to go undercover and enlists Sersi, one of the Eternals, to turn him into a 17-year-old version of himself.

He then makes his way to New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where the incognito Captain America is hypnotized and kidnapped by the villainous Sisters of Sin. They transport him via a bus along with other lost teens to Camp Rage (which, to modern ears, sounds like a destination weekend with the band Lettuce, but carries far more nefarious connotations in this setting). While at the camp, criminal masterminds Mother Night and Minister Blood instruct the teenagers to channel the power of hate.

This story arc concludes in issue No. 357 after Captain America spontaneously returns to his previous size, which enables him to defeat the Sisters of Sin and liberate the young people. On the final page of the story, Captain calls Bernie with an update, explaining that he still hasn’t found her sister. She interrupts him to inform Cap that Nancy hasn’t actually run away, but instead, “She just took off with her boyfriend to follow the Grateful Dead on their concert tour and forgot to tell anyone.”

Captain America is heartened by this news and says to himself: “Considering all the alternatives, this country could use a lot more Deadheads.”

These two panels, which would seem destined for T-shirts—or at least bootleg lot gear—raise an intriguing question: Was anyone at Marvel a Deadhead, and what are the origins of the Nancy Rosenthal as a touring Deadhead subplot?

In the process of considering this, it’s worth noting that Jerry Garcia was a longtime comic book fan. While growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, he was an avid consumer of EC comics, describing this enthusiasm as “one of the ways I got into reading.” EC, which is best known for its horror titles such as Tales From the Crypt, received a series of public rebukes in 1954 during the congressional hearings into juvenile delinquency that vilified the industry, following the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent. Eventually, EC publisher William Gaines stopped producing comics altogether, focusing instead on his new magazine, Mad.

Nearly four decades later, Garcia characterized EC as “the Grateful Dead of the ‘50s,” noting that the obsessive mail in the back of each issue demonstrated that “their fans are like Deadheads.” As one of these individuals himself, he expressed his ongoing fascination with the classic EC comics titles, singling out many of the writers and artists by name, including: Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Bill Elder, Bernie Krigstein and Graham J. Ingels. (Garcia raved that Ingels’ work, with its heavy use of shadows, is akin to a German expressionist film.)

Ken Viola, the Dead’s longtime head of security, recalls, “Garcia and I were big comic-book readers. I remember he told me that when he first got money, he bought a complete collection of EC. I read those, but I also read Marvel Comics when they were Atlas, due to the work of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, so I was in at the beginning of the early ‘60s superhero thing.”

Garcia remained such a lifelong comics fan that, in 1991, he prompted crewmember Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who often focused on the band’s merchandise, to develop Grateful Dead Comix. Candelario recalls, “Jerry volunteered me to do a lot of stu over the years that I wouldn’t have otherwise done. In this case, we brought in [Robert] Hunter, who was skeptical at first, but then he saw how someone like Tim Truman was interpreting his lyrics. The ‘Dire Wolf’ art is amazing.” Garcia set the project in motion and later helped select the artists for the title, which Kitchen Sink Comics published for seven issues.

In his introduction to a compilation of Grateful Dead Comix favorites, Garcia wrote, “The Grateful Dead has always been eclectic stylistically, and so are these comics, going from hard, illustrative styles to cartoony, comic-y, bouncy animated stuff. Being able to have that spread of styles is fun—I don’t know that there’s any absolute aesthetic to comics, just like music, and whether or not this material has any interest to anybody besides Deadheads I couldn’t even begin to guess. It doesn’t matter, really. For me, it’s given me new covers to collect, and made me a happy fan—still a fan-addict after all these years.”

Candelario’s hand in creating the series later sparked an idea that led him directly to Marvel. Candelario had long been in charge of the band’s backstage passes. He remembers that initially they were simply created by using stamps on felt, which, as it turned out, meant that they could be easily counterfeited by zealous Deadheads. By the mid-‘80s, this prompted the band to produce a series of passes for every show with art that varied from night to night, often with ongoing visual themes such as old-time autos. He notes that early on, “I had Jerry and [artist] Rick Griffin on my team to look [at the proposed images] to tell me what was cool and what changes needed to be made.”