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A review by lunchlander
Captain America by Ed Brubaker Omnibus, Vol. 1 by Ed Brubaker
4.0
Ed Brubaker's Captain America run has been pretty astonishing, not just because of the solid level of craft involved, but because he's managed to do what every writer who has written Cap for the last 10 or so years has said they were going to do: Incorporate politics, action and superheroes and do it well. A little Tom Clancy, a little 24, and a lot of Marvel characters.
This is the start of Brubaker's run, but it's also the swansong for Steve Rogers, the original Captain America. This hardcover collects the first twenty-five issues of Brubaker's run, which ends (not really a spoiler unless you don't follow the news) with Cap being killed. It's a dark story, and one fraught with potential problems, especially if you're a long-time fan of the character as I am.
But Brubaker makes it work, and follows up on it nicely (although that's not the job of this Omnibus). It's the culmination of a gigantic plot by Cap's longtime foe the Red Skull, now fused with a corporate raider/ex-Soviet general (it's two post-Cold War villain archetypes in one!), and it's also the climax of a story involving Cap reuniting with his lost love Sharon Carter, a SHIELD agent who was brought back in the '90s by Mark Waid but who really comes into her own as a character in Brubaker's action-by-way-of-noir book.
The artwork by Steve Epting, Mike Perkins and the rest is phenomenal as well. I'll always hold up the Mark Gruenwald Cap as my ideal Cap, a guy who was more than a little bit liberal, who represented an unrealistically noble spirit of the American dream, but Brubaker's Cap, a more realistic portrayal of the cracking of the symbol of America in a fractured post-Bush world, is pretty damn entertaining.
This is the start of Brubaker's run, but it's also the swansong for Steve Rogers, the original Captain America. This hardcover collects the first twenty-five issues of Brubaker's run, which ends (not really a spoiler unless you don't follow the news) with Cap being killed. It's a dark story, and one fraught with potential problems, especially if you're a long-time fan of the character as I am.
But Brubaker makes it work, and follows up on it nicely (although that's not the job of this Omnibus). It's the culmination of a gigantic plot by Cap's longtime foe the Red Skull, now fused with a corporate raider/ex-Soviet general (it's two post-Cold War villain archetypes in one!), and it's also the climax of a story involving Cap reuniting with his lost love Sharon Carter, a SHIELD agent who was brought back in the '90s by Mark Waid but who really comes into her own as a character in Brubaker's action-by-way-of-noir book.
The artwork by Steve Epting, Mike Perkins and the rest is phenomenal as well. I'll always hold up the Mark Gruenwald Cap as my ideal Cap, a guy who was more than a little bit liberal, who represented an unrealistically noble spirit of the American dream, but Brubaker's Cap, a more realistic portrayal of the cracking of the symbol of America in a fractured post-Bush world, is pretty damn entertaining.