New Captain America

I saw Captain America #36 on the rack in the local Border’s book store. The cover image showed Cap with a gun in his hand. This is so wrong.

If you don’t know, Captain America (Steve Rogers) died in the comics world (Marvel comics) last year. It was big news at the time, and I blogged on it. I predicted he’d come back. (I don’t know what happened with the Captain America series to reset the numbering. CA was well into the hundreds when I last read it, but this is issue #36 — that’s just three years of monthly publication.)

I picked up this issue just to see what they’re doing with this new Cap, and to see if a “Captain America with a gun” was as bad as I suspected it was. The whole concept of Captain America using a gun is completely antithetical to the character of Cap. Steve Rogers didn’t use a gun — he didn’t kill.

The new Captain America is James “Bucky” Barnes, the former young sidekick of Cap back in WWII. I know very little about James/Bucky because he was long “dead” before I picked up on Cap comics back in the mid 80s, and he hadn’t “come back” until long after I stopped regularly reading Cap comics in the late 90s.

New Cap is not as good a fighter as Old Cap, and he’s apparently very willing to kill his enemies. I don’t like him. In this one issue alone, New Cap shoots three bad guys (but none of them die). Now, this is not the first time someone with less morals (or mental stability) wore the Captain America uniform, so I’m not going to get all up in arms about this current situation — I just won’t buy another issue with this Cap’n A. This is not my style of Captain America.

I predicted (with no particular wisdom) that Cap would come back. The uniform has come back, but I don’t count that as fulfilling my prediction. The last page of this issue shows what looks like Steve Rogers in some kind of stasis chamber. This starts the fulfilling of my prediction. When Steve Rogers is wearing the red, white, and blue suit again, I’ll say, “Captain America is back.”

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com