My memory is of Roger quitting on creative grounds. Jim Salicrup then offered the writing job to me, but I quit in support of Roger.

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* With Roger and me already started on a three part story, I'm not even sure where such a fill-in could have been placed.

Regarding the Cap 'fill in' issue...

I seem to recall that Shooter had decided that instead of a 4 month lead-time for each issue it would be a 6 month lead-time, during that period. So it was up to the editor to fill the 2 month 'shortfall'.  So, one day Cap was on schedule and the next day Cap was 2 monthes behind schedule. I think that Sterno wrote a Frank Miller fill-in (that was published elsewhere a couple of years later) so he wouldn't lose his bonus, and then Salicrup ordered a Gene Colan fill-in, which set Sterno off.

Both J.B.'s and Roger's recollections are correct, Shooter had created a perfect storm of office-politics that destroyed what would have been a classic Cap story.

JB wrote: With Roger and me already started on a three part story, I'm not even sure where such a fill-in could have been placed.

The fill-in was to be in issue #256, bumping the first part of the Red Skull story to #257.  I believe the story that did wind up appearing in #256 (by Mantlo and Colan) was the fill-in story in question.

Here's Roger's comments for anyone who hasn't seen them:

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GK: Can you explain why John and you left Cap after #255?

RS: That gets a little complicated. Marvel was starting to crack the whip on deadlines, and all the editors were under pressure to get their books on time. I’d had some stomach trouble midway through our run on Cap, and John was about to get married, and Jim Salicrup was understandably worried that we would fall further behind. I thought we could pull ahead in just a matter of weeks – my digestion was already back to normal, and I knew that John’s work ethic was as strong as mine – and to prove it, I sat down and plotted the next three issues straight through. Jim was still uneasy about the deadlines, and so he decided to schedule a fill-in by another writer. I pointed out that we already had a fill-in underway; Frank Miller was drawing a stand-alone Cap story that I was going to script. (It eventually saw print in Marvel Fanfare.)

In those days before royalties, Marvel had what was called a "continuity bonus." If you wrote or drew six consecutive issues, you got a bonus. And so on for the next six, and the next. A fill-in before issue #258 would set all of our bonuses back.

But beyond that, I was worried about losing sales momentum on the series. We’d been working hard to build up the readership, and I knew from my days as an editor that fill-ins usually cost you readers.

Back during those early days of the Direct Market, when the greatest percentage of sales still came from the newsstand, it was a given that sales would dip after each fill-in. It could take a book’s regular creative team as much as three issues to get the readership back up to the pre-fill-in level.

Well, I couldn’t persuade Jim not to schedule a fill-in. And, looking back, if I had been in his shoes, I might have done the same thing. But I wasn’t in his shoes. I was the freelancer, and I didn’t like the way we were being treated.

I’d worked with Jim a long time and I really didn’t want to come to loggerheads with him. So, I took back all three plots, tore up the vouchers, and stepped away from the book. I figured, better to leave Cap on an up note with the 40th anniversary issue.