In the opening sequence, he (admittedly indirectly) kills two terrorists and puts another in a coma. Ed Brubaker’s Captain America is a soldier, because he has to be. He clearly has a vision of who this character is and what he represents, and also what he has to be.
When I read that before my run I said, “Okay, I’m just gonna pretend this story never existed.”īrubaker undoubtedly has his own conception of the character and doesn’t really care if it differs from what came before – and, in fairness, he’s right to. … Then there was story recently where there was a conspiracy that maybe America had put Cap in the ice because he found out we were gonna drop the atom bomb and he was going to stop them. “How is this possible? What good is a super soldier who doesn’t kill the enemy?” This was a war. … I think saying that a guy who was created as a super soldier to fight in World War II never killed the enemy is weird. As Brubaker himself concedes in the additional material at the end of this massive volume, there has been a recent trend towards ‘softening up’ and over simplifying the hero, turning him into an apple-pie-slice of Americana, who never kills: "Hey, Cap, what are we staring at?""You'll know it when you see it, Bucky you'll know it when you see it."Ĭaptain America is a tough hero to write for. He’s still an amazing writer and succeeds in keeping the train mostly on the tracks, but one gets the sense that the collection would have been better if he had been granted complete control over it. Towards the end it feels like Brubaker’s own story has become somewhat derailed by the larger events looming in a shared universe. On the other hand, I’m slow to call the run an instant classic – I’d rather finish his run before I make that judgement.
It’s a clever and well-crafted story that demonstrates that Brubaker has more in him than just gritty pulp like his fantastic runs on Daredevil and Gotham Central. While I haven’t finished Brubaker’s run (it’s on-going and I still have to read The Death of Captain America Omnibus), it is a very solid run, packed with great ideas. I decided that – with the movie coming out next year – it might be worth bringing myself up to speed on the character. There’s a lot of buzz out there suggesting that Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America might be the run on the character, the one for the ages – like Frank Miller’s tenure on Daredevil, for example.
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