Another interlude already! This time out, we’ll look at 2 more issues of FF, and take a brief look at what’s going on in the Captain America tie-ins, because… well, because of how very little they tie in. Same creatives as before on FF, as Reed is sending Firestar to the Negative Zone prison and trying to make himself feel better about it.
Ok, maybe that’s not Firestar. I have no idea who that is. “Red & yellow suit with black jacket and visor but also not Firestar” lady. I dunno, Firestar might not even be wearing that suit anymore in 2006, I can’t recall seeing her. Oh, ok, the next page identifies her as “Wildstreak,” whoever that is. She should team up with Firestar. Oh, wow, Wildstreak is the new character from the FF Annual in 1993, when they all introduced someone new. This is her 4th appearance, which is actually kind of a lot for one of those annual folks. Anyway, Sue helps her escape, smashing out a window while invisible. I hope she can fly.
Sue’s kind of rapping at him. They argue for several more pages of very heavy-handed talk about our cherished freedoms (to put on a mask and dispense your own brand of justice) and being a Nazi and all that, then Sue says, “You’re not Reed. You’re not the man I married.” On that, I agree. All this Millar crap has turned him into a rule following robot. Then she leaves. Forever! Or for like 2 more issues. Nothing will ever be the same! Remember how she snuck out in the night with Johnny during the main book rather than doing this? Did JMS even care about the main book? “This is MY story now.” Then Ben shows up, like, immediately to announce he, too, is leaving. THEN Iron Man and Peter show up for their sequence here in ASM 535, which plays basically the same, except we see Iron Man is eavesdropping (Obviously) as Reed tells his dumb story, and then Reed sings more of that song after they leave. The end! What fun we have. You think Mike McKone was hoping to draw the dissolution of the FF when he signed up? I bet not.
This month opens with Ben going to the airport, some reeeeeeal thin ice stuff with his “vaguely middle eastern” cab driver, and then various government suits showing up to tell him if he leaves the country, they’re freezing his assets and revoking his citizenship. Having fun as always. Then there’s some Komedy Business about air travel, and then Ben is in France, oo la la, where people are rude to him and a guy has a beret AND a Charlie Chaplin mustache, quelle surprise.
I certainly agree with Ben’s facepalm.
Had I purchased this comic in 2006, I may have asked for my money back from my local comic shop. I think they would’ve given it to me, we were on good terms, and this is absolute garbage. The whole rest of the issue is Ben and these dorks fighting rock men and a budget mole man and I do not care.
Your eyes do not deceive you, Dwayne McDuffie appears. Straczynski develops a reputation for just bailing on series. He abandoned his first comic, Rising Stars, tho he did come back and finish it eventually. He did it here, he will soon start a critically and commercially acclaimed run of Thor which he will then abandon. Etc. And so Dwayne McDuffie returns to pick up the slack, and he’s hanging out for awhile, actually. The extant art team hangs in there for this issue and maybe the next, I forget. This one opens with Johnny meeting Reed in a coffee shop. Remember how he went with Sue in the main series? Don’t worry about it. They argue about the registration act, Reed saying the law is necessary even if they don’t agree with it.
They go see the Thinker, and after some convincing, bring him home to check Reed’s equations. Damage Control is there (Dwayne loved Damage Control!) to talk about fixing the holes Sue made, there’s a sweet moment for Reed & the kids (Seemed like Straczynski forgot the kids exist), then he take Thinker to his lab. We cut to Paris, where Ben is fighting Hydra with that Z-Grade Catwoman, and then Johnny comes to try to convince him to come home. He says he’ll think about it. Back in Manhattan…
The change in writing is pretty drastic. Even the slightest implication that Tony Stark is right or could win. The more subtle and natural handling of Reed. It’s pretty obvious. The final issue will wait for the next interlude. Meanwhile: Captain America.
Cap is 22 issues into the run of Ed Brubaker, mostly with Steve Epting, all though this arc and a few other issues are handled by Mike Perkins, and with Frank D’Armata on colors. D’Armata’s tendency toward dark colors suited this book, which was a very good spy thriller starring Cap for its first several years. This run did crazy things with the Red Skull and brought Bucky back as the Winter Soldier, among other things. It featured a Cap working very closely with SHIELD (Bad time for that!) and with the Falcon, going on globe trotting adventures to foil conspiracies and terrorists, dating his longtime love Sharon Carter. Sharon was killed a long time ago, only to be revealed alive in the oft-referenced Mark Waid/Ron Garney run. By this point in the series, Bucky (Having been totally brainwashed as the Winter Soldier until Cap used a bit of the Cosmic Cube to command him to “remember who you are!” in a really great moment) is running around in the margins, unable to face Cap now that he knows what he is, doing black ops stuff for Nick Fury. It’s one of the finest runs of Captain America ever made, easily. And now it gets embroiled in Civil War. Sort of. Sometimes. You want to look at this book to get Cap’s perspective right from his current writer, but Cap doesn’t appear in too much of these, as I recall, Brubaker presumably just trying to get out of the event’s way. He’s got a large cast going, so there’s plenty else for him to do during the event. I don’t wanna get too into non-Cap scenes in these, but for some flavor…
As you can see, the realism trend is in full effect in this title. This segues into Sharon having a psych eval about that meeting. I just realized, after all the Ultimate Sharon Carter on the blog, this is the first time I get to show the original recipe. How strange! Anyway, she says she’s pro-registration, and has never had much use for costumed heroes other than Cap and Falcon, and wonders aloud why she hasn’t tried to stop him without Maria telling her to. She flashes back to talking to Dum Dum right after Cap beat him up in New Avengers 21, Dum Dum saying this never would’ve happened if Nick was still in charge, and wondering if he should retire. So, then, Sharon talks about how she used a dead drop to get Cap to meet her, to try to get him to turn himself in, knowing it would be a betrayal, knowing he’d fall for it because he’d never expect her to betray him.
So, here we find Brubaker smartly creating a little spot for him to try and flesh out Cap’s position. As Millar insists on making Cap seem like a deranged old man yelling at a cloud, Bru tries to make his guy look smarter, and deftly uses Sharon to ask him the hard questions. And it still doesn’t solve my problems with Steve’s behavior in this event, but that’s because the event requires him to act like an idiot, and you can’t polish a turd. Not only is he advocating an indefensible point, but he also seems to think he can get a law repeating by beating up Iron Man. So not only is he wrong, he’s stupid, too, and Captain America is not stupid. Or shouldn’t be, anyway. And Burbaker can’t square that, even if he is one of the best Captain America writers of all time. I wonder how he felt about it. Ah, well. As Steve & Sharon’s conversation continues in a more personal direction, it’s intercut with cape-killers converging on the building… until we learn she gave them the wrong address. In the present, she still can’t believe she did it, nor can she believe she told Steve she loved him. Then the shrink ends their session, and is inevitably revealed to be Dr. Faustus, working for the Red Skull, like old times. The Doc reveals he’s given Sharon the mental command to fall deeply in love with Steve, and that’s why she doesn’t understand her own actions. The Skull has plans for Sharon. Will we see what they are? I think so!
Cap 23 is mostly a Bucky adventure, as he infiltrates a SHIELD facility on intel he got from Sharon on behalf of Nick Fury and deactivates a Fury LMD.
This blog has made me want to revisit so many other classic runs over the decades I’ve covered, but there’s only so many hours in the day. I really enjoyed this Cap run. Bucky gets that LMD under Fury’s control, so he can use it to keep tabs on SHIELD. Ya can’t get the old an out of there. While Fury downloads stuff outta the LMD, Bucky sees it was watching footage of the big fight in Civil War 3 & 4, and wonders aloud what Steve is thinking. Nick is obviously very anti-registration. His penchant for never following the rules despite being the boss of SHIELD is a pretty damning indictment of law enforcement, but of course it’s never presented that way. Bucky learns the bombing he carried out on the mission that led to his being freed was one of the incidents used to justify the act, and feels bad. Then he uses the computer to look up Aleksander Lukin, the guy who was Winter Soldier’s last boss and, through some Cosmic Cube shenanigans, is also host to the consciousness of the Red Skull, who he had assassinated, but Bucky doesn’t know that. Then they use a decoy hologram to lure some cape-killers to an alleyway, where Bucky dispatches them and hacks their suits for future use by him & Nick. And again, at the end, we check in on Red Skull, having traded Dr. Doom info for a mysterious device he plans to use to make sure the civil war is only the beginning of Captain America’s suffering. Sounds scary!
In this final tie-in issue, Sharon is given a new assignment: joining a task force to take down Nick Fury. When Sharon gets back to her quarters, she’s visit by the LMD Bucky reprogrammed.
Now it’s Cap’s turn to somehow squeeze a persona adventure into the tight plot of Civil War. Nick sent him some intel about the Skull, leading him to a place where some AIM transmissions were intercepted. But when he arrives, he finds Hydra trying to loot the same info he’s after.
Not unlike Spider-Man sneaking into Hydra in ASM 522, really. Cap gets just long enough to find out who’s running this station when Hydra goons notice he’s not where he’s supposed to be, and he gets out of their uniform and into action.
Very nice spread. Shades of Steranko. Cap mixes it up, but then one of them blows them all up in an attempt to kill him, which of course fails. And that’s when the cape-killers find him. What a night! But then their suits all start electrocuting them, courtesy of Bucky’s hack last issue.
And in the final pages, Red Skull recruits Arnim Zola for his mysterious plan. Getting a lot of the Captain America classics together for this one. It can’t be good news! But now we get back to our regularly scheduled programming…