The Adventures of Captain Otter

Wow, July is here already?  This is getting a bit upsetting.  My summer break is dwindling down too fast for my liking.  The good news?  The quicker time goes by the quicker the comics come in.  Yesterday I picked up a bunch of great titles.  War of Kings, Deadpool, Iron Man, Batman, and the X-men/Dark Avengers crossover all made the pull list.  There were some fantastic issues in that bunch, so expect to hear more from them.  But today we get to talk about the headliner, the one you’ve been waiting for.  I’m going to talk about Captain America Reborn.   

Bringing characters back from the dead is always tricky.  Its rare for a writer to pull this off and make it feel natural.  And as a general rule, the bigger the character, the harder it is to make it sound convincing.  For example, we saw Quasar come back in the pages of Nova a while back.  The actually means to his revival were decent, but as a smaller character they could play around with it.  All in all, it worked.  So when a big named character like Captain America comes back after an epic death, you better tell one damn good story.  The story itself was alright.  The comic jumped all over the place, dealing with multiple characters at different points in time.  Not quite what I was expecting from Brubaker.  Then again, he’s had to write stories that deal with a handful of characters at most.  This issue had appearances from Nick Fury, the Mighty Avengers, Norman Osborn and his Dark Avengers in addition to the main Captain America cast.  The portrayals of these characters was spot on, but there was a bit too much set up.  I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that more could have happened in this issue, and that the story hasn’t actually started.  A big reason is that much of the issue deals with ground that has already been covered.  We get it, Steve was in WWII, was a hero, died, and the shooter was Sharon Carter.  I’ve heard this way too many times.  Captain America 50, 600 and a bunch of other things have covered this in depth.  They really should release a Captain America Saga and keep it on the shelves.  I understand accessibility, but this is too much.

At this point, watch out for spoilers.  I try to refrain from telling spoilers, but I’m going to make an exception for this issue.  We also hear a bit more on how Bucky and friends plan on bringing Steve back.  Its actually not a surprise, but I mean that in a good way.  Remember all that stuff about Dr. Doom’s time machine?  And at the end of the Man who Bought America arc, the machine Sharon Carter destroyed?  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the time machine served some purpose; the only question was what exactly that purpose was.  Even though we don’t understand the specifics, we’ve been able to guess for a while that it had something to do with bringing Steve back.  Captain America 600 revealed that the Red Skull wants to prove he is Steve’s better, so that is going to come into play.  And we don’t know how the gun works either.  All we know, is that Steve is unstuck in time, and is very much alive.  I don’t understand exactly how that works.  Steve is dead.  We saw his corpse.  My only guess is that his spirit was lost, but not his body. Now what does that sound like?  Its kind of funny that both Batman and Captain America seem to be in the exact same situation.  Lost in time, presumed dead, and their partners replaced them.  I’m not going to say one copied the other though.  Marvel has had this planned for a while, but there is no way DC could have expected that to happen.  It looks like both came up with the idea.  Or both are copying someone else.  But overall, this issue didn’t feel important and was filled with stuff I already could figure out.  I have big expectations for the rest of the series, and the pressure is on. 

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