San Francisco-based former comics collector Jeff Gutman, who is in the process of selling his collection to help buy a house, has been sitting on a secret since he was 13 years old. And it's not just any secret... it's something that has bugged serious Golden Age collectors for decades.

What he discovered was the key to the secret codes aimed at Captain America's Sentinels of Liberty in the early issues of Captain America Comics.

Like many other comics in its day - some of which you've read about before in Scoop - Captain America Comics offered membership in a club for the children who read the comic. The membership kit itself has become a prized collectible, with complete kits selling in excess of $2,500.

Beginning in Captain America Comics #4 and ending in Captain America Comics #20 there was a secret code for members of the Sentinels of Liberty.

When Gutman, who started collecting in 1978, was 13, he noticed this and began visiting with dealers at conventions. He got their permission to sneak a look at these Golden Age treasures, and even though he couldn't understand the codes at first, he wrote them down verbatim until he had all of them.

"The phrases were supposed to be the password that month for the club," he said.

After analyzing the patterns, he eventually deduced the code was not just a simple reversed alphabet, as many clubs used. Instead, he found that is was fairly sophisticated for children in the 1940s.

"The code was the alphabet backwards, but also reversed on itself," he told Scoop.

In other words, it started in the middle, with M, then Z, and so on, until the code would have looked as follows:

m z l y k x j w i v h u g t f s e r d q c p b o a n

The phrase that helped him crack the code worked out to be "V For Victory," and the other phrases like "MacArthur" were equally patriotic slogans.

Gutman may have stopped collecting in 1998, but he's just added a mark to comics history.