CAPTAIN AMERICA...MARVEL'S BEST?

One of my favorite ongoing series at the moment is Captain America. The book (if you aren’t currently reading it) is written by one of the best writers in the Marvel bullpen, Ed Brubaker. The current series kicked off in January of 2005 without much fanfare but comic readers soon discovered that you don’t have to have an “X” in front of your title or Wolverine in it to be one of the best. In fact, readers of Wizard voted Captain America the best series of 2005!



What makes the book so good? It's much more than bringing Bucky back. In my opinion, Marvel went retro. Way back in time before I was a store owner (back before there were comic book stores in this area and you had to go from convenience store to convenience store to get your books), I was a comic reader. My tastes have always revolved around great artwork and awesome stories but back then, you had to take what you could get. Imagine a marketplace that gave you no guarantees of even getting the next issue of a certain title. I’m talking NO local bookstands and NO internet. If you wanted to read comics, you had to buy what the local neighborhood stores had to offer or not buy anything at all.

At the time, DC was stuck in a weird Saturday Morning cartoon-like content rut forcing me away from old favorites like Batman, Superman, and the Justice League. Like other comic readers at the time, I discovered what the Marvel Revolution was all about. Most of Marvel’s content at the time was serious. While Batman was fighting villains like the Crazy Quilt (I’m not making that name up…DC had a Batman bad-guy named Crazy @#$% Quilt), Marvel had the X-Men battling the Hellfire Club and Dark Phoenix. I got exposed to a great number of Marvel titles and characters as a result - such as the Fantastic Four, Avengers, Daredevil, Uncanny X-Men, and the focus of this article: Captain America.

I picked up my first issue of Captain America (actually, issue 245) back in early 1980. The cover captured my attention. With artwork by Frank Miller, the cover featured Anna, one of Steve Roger’s neighbors, holding a gun to the head of a tied-up Nazi. I was completely blown away. The story centered around Anna, a Holocaust survivor, coming face to face with a SS Doctor years later and dealing with the moral dilemma of whether to kill him or not. (To paraphrase WT Sherman, the only good Nazi is a dead one!) I was drawn in to Cap’s world. Luckily, I managed to pick up the next ten issues.



What struck me then was how Roger Stern, the writer starting at issue 247, began playing with the idea that what Cap believed about his past was wrong and he began to retrace his steps to search for answers. In the process, he encountered a Baron Von Strucker Robot, recovered his old shield, and went to England to fight alongside his old Invader teammates against Baron Blood. He even nearly ran for President in the 1980 election. My favorite parts of this particular run were the flashbacks that we, the readers, were treated to. Afterwards, I had a great deal of respect for who Cap was as well as for who he is.



Now, flash forward twenty-five years and countless comics later - Ed Brubaker was tapped to re-launch Captain America. Faced with the fact that in the previous five years, Captain America has had five different series to come out, Brubaker’s job wasn’t an enviable task, especially with a recent history like that. However, he chose to let Cap’s diverse past help him, rather than impede him. As Roger Stern had done before him, EB chose to challenge the concept of who Captain America is. In the process, the reader’s concept of this was also brought into question.



If you don’t read this book or you think that Captain America is not as cool as a six-claw-popping, beer-guzzling furry Canadian mutant who doesn’t get enough me time, you don’t know what you’re missing…cause it might be Marvel's best!

Captain America on sale monthly $2.99
Captain America: Winter Soldier VOL 1 Trade Paperback (collects 1-6) $16.99
Captain America: Winter Soldier VOL 2 Trade Paperback (collects 1-6) $16.99