Captain America: Reborn #4
Ed Brubaker, writer
Bryan Hitch, artist
Marvel, November 2009
40 pages
$3.99
In which we learn that Sharon Carter is not just the Billy Pilgriming Captain America’s “constant” in the Lost sense–she’s literally a Cap magnet, pulling him toward her through the timestream thanks to some nanotech in her blood. Ain’t Marvel Universe pseudoscience grand? That’s really all I need to get me over what reservations I had about injecting a time-displacement angle into Brubaker’s years-long top-drawer super-spy saga. And to be fair, the megastoryline kicked off with the Cosmic Cube, the wonkiest of all Marvel’s made-up tech/mystic mumbo jumbo, while one of its best scenes to date involved Bucky’s dismembered cybernetic arm springing to life and taking out a room full of SHIELD goons, so this is not without precedent. (There were some cool giant robots in there too, iirc.)
One of my favorite things about Brubaker’s run–and in this he’s been indispensably assisted by a solid stable of artists, led by Steve Epting and Mike Perkins and stood in for here by the slicker style and cantilevered action of Bryan Hitch, who in every other way is consistent with the established tone–is just how good he is at grouping various super-people together and having those groupings make visual and practical sense. Several times I’ve touted how he’s established this sort of underbelly to the Marvel Universe involving super-powered espionage-based characters: Steve Rogers, Bucky, Black Widow, Union Jack, Crossbones, Agent 13, Nick Fury and so on all look like people you really could believe take advantage of whatever relatively slight super powers they have, put on some form-fitting garb and skullcaps, and go out and assault people in classified military installations. In this issue you see some new combos in that regard, most notably a Bucky-Cap/Black Widow/Ronin trio, who are put through the paces by Hitch in a memorable hit-and-run attack in Marvel’s oft-destroyed Times Square. Elsewhere, Bru and Hitch take a trio of gaudier, more straightforwardly superheroic characters–Mister Fantastic, Hank Pym or whatever he’s calling himself now, and the Vision–and, despite this being the least naturally resonant area of the Marvel U. for Brubaker’s Cap, somehow make them click in that world as a braintrust tasked with cracking the enemy technology that’s brought Cap low.
But the best such scene–the scene that made me want to write the book in the first place–occurs when Homeland Security Commissar Norman “The Green Goblin” Osborn’s right-hand woman Victoria Hand (yup!) drags Sharon Carter, the brainwashed and disgraced Agent 13, in handcuffs into a secret lair. She looks down, and there looking back at her are Doctor Doom, the Red Skull (who’s now trapped in a robot body with a Red Skull mask and an SS uniform), racist luchadore Crossbones, Skull’s S&M daughter Sin, and the torso-themed robot Nazi mad scientist Doctor Arnim Zola. Sharon’s reaction is more bugged-out disbelief than anything else, and it’s entirely appropriate: As assembled by Brubaker, drawn by Hitch, and staged in a clever two-level set-up by the two of them, man oh man does this come across as a batshit-insane crew of lunatics. You really can’t even begin to imagine what kind of crazy horrorshow they’ve got in store for whoever’s unlucky to be dragged into that lab; it’s like the scene in Blue Velvet where Dennis Hopper forces Kyle MacLachlan into Dean Stockwell’s place, only with Doombots and time machines instead of overweight prostitutes and Roy Orbison songs.
And now that I’m writing about it, the scene reminds me in its weird, you-gotta-be-shitting-me way of a very different “here come the bad guys” reveal: that wonderful spread in the first issue of Geoff Johns and Phil Jimenez’s Infinite Crisis where you realize that Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters are about to get their collective bell rung by Bizarro, Zoom, Cheetah, Sinestro, Black Adam, Deathstroke, Dr. Light, Psycho-Pirate, and that DC Magneto guy Dr. Polaris–just about as fearsome an array of opposite-numbers and cool power-sets as DC can offer. But while that was prime momentism, this is like anti-momentism–the staging peels back the “whoa” factor and transforms it into a sort of wordless shudder. This is the kind of thing you want every superhero comic you read to be able to deliver.
Tags: comics, comics reviews, Comics Time, reviews
I haven’t read all of Brubaker’s run yet, but is there any explanation as to exactly why Doom is helping the Skull? They’ve always tried to kill each other every other time they’ve met, the most prominent reason being that Doom identifies as a gypsy and loads and loads of gypsies were killed in the holocaust. Besides the fact that the Skull also tried to conquer Latveria a few times as well.
It’s been a long run and they might have addressed it and I just don’t remember, or it might have been addressed in Books of Doom, that miniseries Bru wrote that tied in a bit with the Cap run. The impression I get is that there’s some quid pro quo arrangement that’s leading them to hold their noses and deal with one another.
I’m sure Brubaker’s got everything covered neatly in terms of plot, motivations, page-to-page storytelling and the like, and it looks pretty, too.
My big problem with his CAPTAIN AMERICA is that it hasn’t surprised or moved me in well over a year, at this stage; it increasingly feels like painting by numbers, and hell if I know what’s driving any of the characters at this point.
And, I have to say, the ending of the previous issue — the Red Skull pulling his mask over his robot head — is probably the most misjudged bit of storytelling I’ve seen from Brubaker. It was MEANT to evoke the sense of batshit craziness you mention, sure. But instead I was just rolling my eyes. As a full-page cliffhanger, this didn’t work at all for me. Any dramatic point it was trying to make was completely undermined by the silliness of the moment.