Captain America #3:
Summary: While Cap is battling the Ameridroid, Sharon Carter is jumped in her apartment(which is overlooking the battle) by Baron Zemo. After an extended battle, Cap manages to put down the Ameridroid, so Zemo tosses Sharon out of her window. Cap saves his falling girlfriend, and Zemo manages to make good his escape. Cap and Sharon take the Ameridroid to a Project PEGASUS lab in New York where they meet up with Nick Fury. The trio are kind of surprised by how easily the Ameridroid went down, and while they are having their meeting, Bravo sets up shop in an ambulance outside the PEGASUS building and has one of his men fire shots at some police officers. Cap, Sharon and Fury rush over to the window to see what was happening, and the Ameridroid wakes up from playing possum and rushes Cap, knocking him out the window of the lab. While the two are falling, Bravo uses Jimmy Jupiter(please don't ask...) to open a portal to Nowhere, the land Bravo had been stranded in for decades. Upon arriving in Nowhere, Bravo callously kills the Nazi scientist who had been trapped in the Ameridroid's form and knocks Cap unconscious with a massive punch, ending this issue.
Thoughts: Meh. I sadly just can't seem to get into this story... I hate Baron Zemo as a villain. I don't care about Bravo, Jimmy Jupiter, OR the new Hydra Queen from Nowhere. I'm actually just tired of Brubaker continuously returning to Cap's WWII past to bring back former allies/enemies for him to fight. It worked perfectly with Bucky because NOBODY expected it, plus the storytelling was magnificent, with Brubaker PERFECTLY capturing both Bucky and Cap's emotions. But this stuff with Bravo? There IS no emotional attachment to him, since he was never mentioned prior to this storyline. This is simply a Winter Soldier-lite storyline, it lacks the emotional impact and the Commie brainwashing shenanigans the original Winter Soldier storyline had, but is still trying for the same sort of feel. The sooner this storyline ends, the better.
Score: 5 1/2 out of 10.
Did Baron Zemo really smack Sharon Carter upside the head!? That was awesome!
I have to say that while This cap series is no winter soldier thus far... I will give brubaker credit for breaking the norms. I liked the norms in the cap books for the past few years but i do like seeing him bring a little imagination into the project. I was really disliking this storyline in issue 2, but now coming to realize that this is a sort of "dreamland" and not really reality; the story has a bit of originality. Brubaker is great at mystery/suspense/espionage. But I also love the cap of old (gruenwald, waid, rieber. I mean in Gru's run cap has an airbag-armomred chest plate for crying out loud! haha. Anyway the story hasn't been great. My biggest dissapointment though is that there are no seeds for anything else being planted. The bravo storyline is a bit of a cliche, but im sad to say that I can't think of anything being planted for this ongoing yet. Here's to hoping we get something good after this story arc. Captain America deserves it!
ReplyDeleteI LOVED Gruenwald's Cap run! With the exception of Brubaker's current run, that is my favorite Cap run by FAR. Gruenwald is the guy who made me into a Captain America fan. Brubaker made me into a fanatic.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's my own really high expectations that are hurting this story for me... It's hard not to compare this storyline to the Winter Soldier story, they both started at the beginning of a Cap series, they were both written by Brubaker, they both featured the return of a character from Cap's WWII past, etc. I actually wonder if I'd be enjoying this storyline more if we would have gotten some closure to Bucky's run as Cap... Brubaker himself might be trapped in a holding pattern as he waits for Fear Itself to end before he can really start planting those seeds for down the road.
One good thing about this issue is that at least Sharon Carter didn't get knocked unconscious in the first panel of the fight...
ReplyDeleteShe actually showed she could be more than the token damsel in distress, so yes, that's definitely a nice change of pace!
ReplyDelete