In part one of this series, I wrote about how Captain America was one of my favorite characters and how I thought it was high time I gave him more attention. I started going through the various eras I’ve read through and stopped in late 1996 with…

Heroes Reborn and Heroes Return

Heroes Reborn is one of those infamous events in Marvel history. In case you didn’t know or have, for various reasons, blocked the late nineties out of your memory, Marvel contracted Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld to revamp some of their flagship characters that had been left behind in the wake of characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men and Punisher and Ghost Rider. The reason this was such a big deal is that just four years earlier Lee and Liefeld were part of the mass defection of Marvel’s most popular artists to go form Image.

It was a whole thing.

Jim Lee got Fantastic Four and Iron Man to work on while Liefeld got the Avengers and Captain America. Liefeld’s revamp of Cap wasn’t exactly controversial but it did draw a lot of criticism. A lot of it had to do with this image.

Again, it was a whole thing.

Liefeld teamed up with Jeph Loeb for the first six issues of the new series and, I have to be honest, it’s not bad. The art is wonky. I mean really wonky. Liefeld has a lot of energy, but perspective tends to elude him. Cap’s shield changed size from one panel to the next. Body parts were all over the place. On the other hand, the overall premise of the revamp was great. Instead of being frozen in a block of ice Steve Rogers had his memories suppressed and was living a seemingly normal life with a wife and a kid. The Red Skull returns, along with Master Man, and there’s a new Bucky and nuclear weapons and Tom Cruise showed up at one point (the first Mission Impossible movie was big at the time) and it was all really exciting. It felt like this would have been the Captain America movie that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would have made in the nineties.

(To be fair, all of the Heroes Reborn titles felt like this. Which was kind of the point.)

After Liefeld left the remaining issues, written mainly by James Robinson, seemed more at home in the seventies or the eighties than they did in the mid-nineties. As I wrote earlier, the point of Heroes Reborn was to breathe new life into the characters that had fallen in popularity as the X-Men and Spider-Man and other characters like Punisher and Ghost Rider became the ones that readers were responding to and however muddled Loeb and Liefeld’s six issues were at least it was trying something new and trying to get the reader’s attention. Falling back to a plot that would have been at home during Englehart or Gruenwald’s runs was curious.

They weren’t bad. It just felt like a Bronze Age story with nineties art.

Mark Waid and Ron Garney came back with Heroes Return and got another new number one. Waid’s second bite at the apple was a welcome return to what had been lost when Heroes Reborn happened. The only real issue I had with this run was Cap losing his shield in the second issue. It was cool seeing him using his original shield for a time, but the whole energy shield thing never did anything for me. On the plus side, we got a great Red Skull story that sparked some controversy when one of the issues, fourteen, was rescripted and had art changes because editorial deemed it too dark. The original version has been published in several of the collected editions of this run.

The Early 2000s

Dan Jurgens followed Waid as writer and eventually artist on the book starting with issue 25 of the Heroes Return series and delivered a little over two years of solid Captain America action. The high point for me was the Protocide storyline where we learn that a soldier named Clinton McIntyre, who had been court martialed due to him killing a superior officer, was given the super soldier serum after Steve Rogers. Like William Burnside (the Captain America of the fifties) the Vita Rays were left out of the process and McIntyre went a little mad, killed some people, and then collapsed due to the strain the serum was putting on his body. He was revived by an A.I.M. double agent and was told that Steve Rogers stole his destiny.

It was a really cool story. I dug it.

Marvel Knights and Beyond

The Heroes Return series ended with issue fifty and Captain America, like a lot of Marvel characters in the late nineties and early 2000s, was given a new title under the Marvel Knights banner. I can’t really discuss this run as a whole because outside of the first storyline, I’ve never read it. That first storyline was heavily influenced by the events of 9/11 and had art by the late John Cassiday. It’s not that it was bad. I just didn’t care for it overall and the same held for the rest of this volume.

That series ended during the Disassembled event and Cap received yet another volume with another new number one. Ed Brubaker was the writer, and Steve Epting was the artist and they, along with a few other creators, were the reason we got an amazing series of Captain America films starting in 2011. This volume of Captain America came during the time period where Marvel really got its act together in terms of the line as a whole. The early 2000s were a chaotic time at Marvel. They came into the 21^st century limping from the bankruptcy of the late nineties and were trying to get their feet solidly back on the ground. After a few years of throwing things at the wall to see what would stick and publisher Bill Jemas and Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada doing a frat boy take on the persona Stan Lee adopted in the sixties things finally came together with the revamps of 2004.

Like or hate Avengers: Disassembled and the Disassembled event as a whole, this new era brought in a new generation of readers. To be fair, it disenfranchised some members of the previous generation, but from 2004 to about 2012 the changes and the direction gave Marvel a consistency and identity that DC struggled with during the same time period.

Brubaker’s first storyline had echoes of the Bronze Age stories of Englehart and the early part of Gruenwald’s run, but unlike the Heroes Reborn issues that did the same thing, Brubaker made it all feel very modern. He brought back the Red Skull in an innovative way, did some cool things with the Cosmic Cube, and wrote my favorite version of Sharon Carter.

He also brought back Bucky.

I realize that the idea of bringing Bucky back from the dead might seem normal in the wake of the MCU using pieces of Brubaker’s run as inspiration, but at the time it was a BIG FREAKING DEAL. Bucky was dead. That was law. You couldn’t bring Bucky back or you would ruin all of the pathos that Stan gave to his noble sacrifice. But this was still early 2000s Marvel and while things were getting more together there was still a sense that slaying sacred cows was the way to go.

What ultimately made it work is that the storyline was really good. The explanation for how Bucky managed to survive what happened and Bucky finally breaking free of his Winter Soldier conditioning took some time. And then Brubaker killed Steve and Bucky became Captain America, which further proves that some of the best Captain America stories are when someone else is in the suit.

The fact that Bucky Cap worked so well again falls onto the execution. Stever’s death came out of the Civil War event, which I really don’t care for, but the way Brubaker played the death, the fallout of from the death, Bucky working through his issues, and then ultimately adopting the identity was so well done that the whole Civil War angle doesn’t matter.

Conclusion

I stopped reading the books around the time of Captain America: Reborn. For a variety of reasons. I was starting to slowly walk away from new comics around that time and while Brubaker stuck with the character for a few more years, I was, for weird reasons, kind of done for the moment. I haven’t read the second part of Brubaker’s run, the Rick Remender Marvel NOW series, the Nick Spencer Hydra Cap storyline, Sam Wilson as Cap, and so on. I will admit that both Ta-Nehisi Coates and J. Michael Straczynski’s runs have piqued my interest. I should get around to finally reading those.

Despite that I still feel like I can call myself a fan of Captain America. I will also admit that over the past decade I have struggled a bit with my feelings about the character. It has nothing to do with Steve Rogers. It has to do with my complicated feelings about the direction America has been going in since 2016. It’s weird reading about a character that wears the American flag as his costume when you’re angry about the decisions and actions that those in charge have made and taken.

Ultimately, I fall back on the idea that despite feeling that there is a huge difference between what I think America is supposed to stand for and the reality of what it is I can also still love a character that represents those values. Captain America means different things to different people. My favorite versions of Steve Rogers are the ones where he goes with his principles rather than being a lapdog for the government, which is why the two times he’s quit because due to existential reasons work so well for me. Oddly enough, it was an appearance Cap made in Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again storyline that best encapsulates how I see the character.

At the same time, I love me some action-packed Captain America stories. Watching him taking on Crossbones or the Red Skull or Batroc the Leaper is as much fun as watching him fight with a battalion of Nazis or terrorists or bad guys in general. He can be part of a standard super hero story, or he can be part of a story that would be at home in a Tom Clancy novel. When written correctly he’s a nuanced character that struggles with his allegiances and with being a man out of time, but he’s also a man of principle.

It’s complicated. Like most things.

More to follow…