Happy Fifth of July! I was probably just going to enjoy my day off from work and laze about this weekend, but then we got a new Captain America #1, and I felt that would be a good read and review for this great American holiday.

Comic Book of the Week obviously goes to Captain America #1 for a story that really has me excited!

Meanwhile, I am spending most of my 3-day weekend just playing Death Stranding 2 because it’s exactly the game I hoped it would be! I am spending so much time just making deliveries, gathering materials and building roads and monorail tracks. Such fun! And I’ve finally gotten into Taskmaster, with the series 19 finale absolute perfection!

Comic Reviews: Captain America #1.

Captain America #1
Writer: Chip Zdarsky
Artist: Valerio Schiti
Colorist: Frank Martin
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna

I’m definitely willing to check out a Chip Zdarsky take on Captain America.

In this flashback story, we’re only a week or so after Captain America was unfrozen — which is now sometime post-9/11, using Marvel’s sliding timescale. Steve is still finding his bearings and has decided to return to the U.S. Army rather than join the Avengers. General Thaddeus Ross is happy to have him and already has a mission for him: infiltrate Latveria and save some U.S. diplomats from the newly reigning Doctor Doom. After getting some advice from Reed Richards, Cap goes to the mission briefing and meets his team of commandos, including a David Colton.

Who is David Colton? Well we’ve been getting to know him throughout the issue in a side story. He was a teenager who witnessed 9/11 first hand, from the streets, and immediately lied about his age and health to enlist. And holy cow, you guys, it seems like he’s going to be the post-9/11 Captain America.. I’m so in.

Comic Rating: 9/10 – Great.

So here is what I think is happening and why I was instantly in love with the ending of this comic: Using Marvels’ notorious sliding timescale, Zdarsky has invented a post-9/11 Captain America that existed before the real Cap was unfrozen. And I think that’s brilliant. Let me explain: Marvel using a sliding timeline so that its characters can stay young in the modern day. I’m not particularly a big fan, but it is what it is. There’s also the existence of the Captain America of the 1950s, a man named William Burnside. Captain America comics debuted in the 1940s and WWII, and then continued into the 50s, with comics about Cap fighting Commies. But then when Stan Lee brought Cap into the Avengers, he firmly established that Cap got frozen in the ice at the end of the war and then woke up in the 60s with the Avengers.

So how do you explain Cap and Bucky fighting Communists in the 1950s? Leave that up to writer Steve Englehart and his run on the series in the 1970s, who retroactively explained that the 1950s was this weirdo named Burnside who the government propped up as a new Cap, with Jack “Nomad” Monroe as his Bucky. It was a neat little retcon that fixed Cap’s publishing history…while also laying the groundwork that the government propped up some other Cap’s after Steve Rogers was frozen. There was also William Naslund and Jeffrey Mace who filled in as Cap at times.

So if we take the idea of the government creating replacement Captain Americas while Steve was frozen, and we apply it to Marvel’s sliding timescale, then it’s a perfectly legitimate story idea that the military did it again after 9/11 and during the War on Terror! Hence David Colton!

I absolutely love this idea! If I’m right about this — and I could be very, very wrong — then this could be a retcon on the level of the Sinestro Corps or Iron Fists throughout history. Using existing comic book lore and mechanics to add a new, creative wrinkle. And I’m here for it! What a fun and very interesting way to add a new character to Cap’s history. Obviously we already saw a version of Captain America deal with the War on Terror in The Ultimates, my all-time favorite comic book series. So it’ll be nice to see that handled anew with the benefit of hindsight and the passage of time.

As for the issue itself, the storytelling is very strong, though I’ll admit that the comic as a whole doesn’t exactly live up to the excitement of this new character. The sliding timescale is just so weird, and reading about ‘young’ versions of these characters existing in a post-9/11 world is just weird. Reed Richards as a young man in the modern day? It’s just weird, dammit! But the character writing is strong, and a lot of it serves to set up and embellish Steve Rogers as a heroic and patriotic figure, really establishing the character and the story’s starting point for this new run.

The David Colton scenes are solid. They’re pretty standard, in my opinion, for an origin story. He’s a weak, sickly kid who joins the military after 9/11, gets picked on by bullies and then gets recruited into the super soldier program. I think the real juicy stuff is yet to come with him, and I can’t wait to see him as a full grown adult, fully invested in being the War on Terror Captain America. Maybe he’ll be a villain, maybe he’ll be an ally, maybe he’ll be a villain and then get a redemption arc. I don’t know, but I’m super excited to see this character fleshed out!

Artwork is phenomenal, as one would expect from Schiti.

TL;DR: Fairly straight forward and solid issue builds to a very exciting cliffhanger and promise for a very interesting story ahead.

The comics I review in my Hench-Sized reviews are just the usual comics I grab from Comixology any given week, along with a few impulse buys I might try on a whim. So if there are any comics or series you’d like me to review each week, let me know in the comments.

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