Boy howdy
does this issue have some serious work to do. Nick Spencer's run and
the terrible fascism-flavoured crossover that it spawned left a
terrible taste in a lot of people's mouths. Secret Empire
was, according to some industry pundits, the second worst selling
event in recent memory. It put a lot of people off the character,
some of them off of Marvel entirely, and series that were launched as
spin-offs debuted at below the sales level where series usually get
cancelled.
The
event didn't do what it was meant to do in financial terms, pissed
off a lot of the hardcore fanbase that Marvel relies on for sales and
word of mouth advertising (the only sort the comicbook industry can
afford nowadays).
So
now we have Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, both creators whose work I've
adored in the past, coming along to try and save Steve Rogers from
recent bad creative decisions by taking him on a soul searching road
trip across the country whose best self-image he's meant to
represent.
So
how does it go?
The
answer is “okay” with a side order of “oddly business as
usual”. The story is absolutely a reaction to Secret Empire
and Hydra!Cap but its also not that far afield from the sort of
standard issue character primer sort of story you'd usually get at
the beginning of a run like this. There's one mention of the events
of Secret Empire that sets up the excuse for why people still
trust Steve (Hydra!Cap was an impostor pretending to be Steve but we
know better, don't we?) and that's your lot.
Except
it isn't. The plot of this issue is that Cap is revisiting a town in
Nebraska he visited shortly after being pulled from the ice. Back
then he fought a small and pretty crap bunch of neo-fascists called
Rampart and now he's returned because he's heard they're back and
planning to do bad things at the site of their original humiliation
and they're more organised and better equipped than they were when he
last saw them.
Oh,
its getting all political up in those comicbooks, isn't it?
My
reaction is this: good. This is exactly the sort of story that should
be written with Captain America in an era where fascism is getting
horribly fashionable again. He beat them in the Second World War, he
beat them when they were crap a decade ago and he'll beat them now.
Nice message, I like it. Add to that some heartwarming scenes of
people rushing to help others in the aftermath of the attack and
we're back to this being a series about the best aspects of people,
the aspirational side of the character and the ideals he's meant to
represent.
Captain
America punches Nazis so nice people can continue to be nice to each
other. It might seem a bit basic but a) that's exactly the sort of
soft reboot the series needed after banking up so damn much bad
publicity in the last couple of years and b) a sentiment that
surprisingly needs a lot of explanation in a world where Wolfenstein
is considered a risky, politically charged and grossly insensitive
computer game for having you kill Nazis.
Nazis.
Fuck 'em. Glad to see Captain America's on my side in this again.
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