f13.net

I thought about calling this thread "MARVEL HAS INVADED MY MOTHERFUCKING", but Brubaker has done solid work on Cap, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and it also helps that the new design is by Alex Ross.  But still, Cap with a Gun?!? (http://www.newsarama.com/marvelnew/CapAmerica/newdesign.html)  Obviously, we're meant to think that this new Cap is Bucky.  I'm not sure if Bru is just going with the obvious outcome, or if this is all some sort of misdirection.  More concept art if you follow the link.

(http://www.newsarama.com/marvelnew/CapAmerica/CapRoss_t.jpg)

Cap with a gun = The Punisher

The real Cap was definitely not down wit it (remember he kicked Castle's ass in Civil War for blasting someone?). But since Frank is such a fanboy, and already wanted to be a copycat in the first place, my guess is that it's him. Or it may as well be.

[EDIT] The black suit seems to indicate that too.

Hmmm, so between Bucky and Punisher, we have a cyborg type and a 'kill 'em all' type.  All we need is Iron Man painted in the stars and stripes, and a clone using Steve Rogers' and the Red Skulls combined DNA.   

I think they already did the Punisher as Cap storyline (or are in the middle of it) over in one of the Punisher books.  Also, throwing the Punisher into the book wouldn't fit at all with what Brubaker has been doing.  It almost has to be Bucky/Winter Soldier (who did take the shield, and also uses a fairly similar gun at times).

Edit:

(http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/51F3krWcHiL._SS500_.jpg)

It'll be Bucky. And despite the good writing Brubaker has done, it's going to be raping the goddamn name. Of course, it isn't like I didn't expect it, but fuck sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

Joe Q seems dead set on fucking Marvel Comics into the ground with Bendis as his go-go Gadgetcock.

If it is Bucky though, I'm wondering if the gun will actually be used for anything lethal, given that he wasn't willing to kill Crossbones an issue back.

Look like, Red skull finally won.

(http://www.marveldirectory.com/pictures/individuals/r_1d/redskull.gif)
"Shoot me down, and your conversion will be complete!"

HOLY CRAP IS HE SHINY!! WHAT THE HECK?! MY EYES!!


But serious, what the hell? Why is he so shiny?  And...gun?

He's shiny because that part of the costume is supposed to be metal.  I'm not sure if will be that shiny in the interior art, or if it's mostly just going to be on Alex Ross' cover art.  The gun may or may not be used lethally, don't know yet.

So in that string of comic books, all metal is going to be HOLY CRAP SHINY SHINY SHINY?  Ditch the gun! I don't care if he uses it or not.  He could kill a man with his shield for all I care, but no guns at all.

Captain America should have a gun that shoots shields.

Alex Ross.

This sucks. ;_;

I'm not entirely sold on the costume design, but Brubaker's done a great job of writing so far.

Hopefully he gets rid of the whole super shiny deal.  It looks cool, just too shiny.

So I've read Cap #33. And unless they pull a huge trick next issue, Bucky/Winter Soldier WILL be the new Captain America.

Le sigh. I hate being right.

I'm crying a tear AND OMG IT IS SO COLD IT HAS FROZEN TO MY FACE!

Personally I'm liking the storyline so far (mind you I also liked when John Walker took over as Captain America).  I think it's an interesting concept putting a psychologically damaged Bucky into a position where he's trying to live up his best friend's (who happens to be Captain America) legacy.

There's a pretty good reason I stopped reading Marvel comics in the mid-90s.  This is a big part of it.

Good writing and art?

I've liked Brubaker on Capt. America, right up until they killed Steve Rogers. Then... not so much. It's not as bad as Bendis on... well, anything these days, but it's missing something. Oh yes, it's missing Captain America. And it has way too much Tony Stark, a character that I absolutely cannot fucking stand anymore. I think that's likely my biggest problem with the new Captain story, they are trying to portray Stark as sympathetic. And I just have no sympathy left for the character.

The consequences of Civil War are that I just can't be in anyway sympathetic to many of the characters, such as Stark and Reed Richards. Fuck, they've even managed to make Prof. Xavier into a complete cockbag, and mostly because they are writing these characters so counter to what they've been for 30 years.

I'm not going to let what Bendis does with Tony Stark in his shitty books ruin my enjoyment of how Brubaker writes him in Cap.  And sure Steve Rogers is missing from the book right now, but the only reason I give a shit about that in the first place is because Brubaker is the first writer since Gruenwald who actually made me like the character.

Oh, and Xavier was alway a bit of a cockbag.  Recruiting teenagers to form his own personal superhero team is only just barely more responsible than Batman recruiting orphans in their early teens to help fight crime in the slums of a crime-ridden city, with an outfit that offers no protection and has a bullet magnet color scheme.

Guns can only point in one direction.  Better at the kid than at the Bat.

But at least Xavier was a sympathetic cockbag. He had a compassion that is completely lacking in the way anyone writes him now. And they've gone back and retconned in all this cold-hearted bullshit, such as Vulcan, the sentient Danger Room and the whole Illuminati thing to make him much more of a cockbag than he ever really was. As for the recruiting teenagers thing, I always took that as a comic book thing. Sure, it's stupid and dangerous, but it's comic books. It's just one of those things you accept as natural to that universe, the same as radioactivity causing a blind kid to have a radar sense and put on devil-flavored spandex.

Superheroes as a whole just fall down when you apply real-world thinking to them.

I don't know, I find it hard to get worked up much over anything they do to Prof. X, as I think the X-men really outgrew the need for having him around a couple decades back.

You could also argue that it's not so much that he specifically goes looking for teenagers to recruit as it is the fault of the mutation process that it manifests during the teenage years.  He's historically been against letting the youngest generation out to do any real superhero-ing.  But you have to pick up these kids and train them when the powers manifest, lest they hurt themselves or others.

I have to agree that retconning in all these borderline evil, manipulative things to Prof. X is silly.  It reduces his position as a character, not to mention the whole MLK/Malcolm X allegory.

I find it funny that Prof. X's solution to human / mutant relations was to train up mutants into a paramilitary force that does what it wants, when it wants, with no real kind of civilian oversight nor any real human involvement whatsoever.

Yeah, I'm sure that makes the humans feel real comfortable about mutants with groups like the X-Men running around  :awesome_for_real:

Cap having a gun makes Cap interesting.

That was one of the things I liked in DKR (back before Frank Miller went completely off the deep end) - bad guy shoots at Batman, hits BRIGHT YELLOW Batman symbol on chest...which (naturally) has a kevlar lining behind it. Batman self-narrates something like "Why do you think I wear a target on my chest? I can't bulletproof the cowl".

I think only a tiny fraction of the kids at the Xavier school are equipped or sent out for fighting (i.e. "X-Men"). He's just trying to educate fucked up and lost mutant kids. If there's any real douchebaggy thing about him, it's that he thinks he knows best. But the thing is, he does.

Professor X wasn't training kids to fight humans, he was training the kids to protect themselves from 1) humans who want to kill mutants, 2) mutants who want to kill humans and any mutants who will protect them and 3) their own powers getting out of control and getting them in trouble with all of the above. It wasn't like the X-Men were a paramilitary force trying to overthrow the government. Granted, humans probably don't see it that way, but that's the benefit of being the audience.

BTW, the doucheifying of Xavier actually started back in the '90's with Uncanny #309 (the issue detailing his relationship with Amelia Voght, among other things).

Don't forget about the stealth jet fighter and the advanced alien technology he hoards away from the government.

One could have said the same about the Avengers, or the Fantastic Four or really any super-team before the Avengers were given UN status.

Problem is that, good intentions or not, the X-Men operate completely independently and have often acted in ways that probably aren't in the long-term interests of anyone but themselves (such as: any time they let Magneto walk away alive because "killing another mutant isn't the X-Men way" or whatever, or letting Jean Grey back into the team no matter what the Phoenix Force is up to at that point in time). They are a mutant defence force who can appear any time, any where and destroy whole cities. While Prof. X proclaims he just wants to help mutants and humans co-exist, he certainly doesn't bring humans into any of his planning other than as afterthoughts.

I don't sweat it too much - I file it along with such things as "people of the Marvel Universe hate and fear Wolverine because he's a mutant with weird powers, but throw parades for Thor and Mr Fantastic" as inconsistencies Marvel doesn't really deal with.

That's why the X-books used to be kept mostly separate from the others.  Yes it was the same universe, but we could ignore it when they never crossed paths.

So, issue #34 then:

- The uniform looks a lot better in the book than it does in the promotional art.  Of course this issue takes place entirely at night, so that might help a bit.

- The first time he uses his gun is the best moment in the book.  No kidding.

- Bucky as Cap is a bit an awkward fit, and it's supposed to be.  Yeah, I miss having a Cap book with Cap in it, but it's Marvel so we know it's going to get back to that point eventually, and in the meantime we have a Bucky and Black Widow team-up.

- Still one of the only books for your non-douchebag Stark fix.

- The last page is pretty brutal for a mainstream Marvel book.

Haven't read it yet. Joe Q. was on The Colbert Report Tuesday night whoring it up, and is apparently letting the artists run Colbert '08 ads throughout the backgrounds of the books so that Colbert will keep pimping Marvel stuff. He whores up the Skrull invasion and the new Captain America as well.

I looked at the promotional art.  It looks good but I have one question.

Why is Captain America wearing Puerto Rico's flag?

It was done well. Anything can work if it's written right. Anything can fail if it's written poorly. If you can't write good stories with a married Spider-Man, for example, then your problem isn't "Spider-Man is married", it's "our writers suck". Brubaker basically does every book he's on really well, but this is one of his best books in recent years. Even the gun didn't bother me, precisely because it emphasizes the strangeness-of-Bucky/Winter Soldier-as-Cap that the book worked off of really well. It wasn't like Bucky put on the suit and instantly was making speeches about the spirit of America from the steps of Capitol Hill.

Read it. If it were a less talented writer than Brubaker, it would have sucked. As it is, it's ok, but I'm just not buying that Bucky will be the permanent Captain America. My enjoyment of the story is really tainted by the ridiculous steps they've taken editorially with Spider-Man.

I agree that he's not going to be Cap for a long time. They've even got a natural story-telling window coming where they can reintroduce Steve Rogers completely within the norms of comic-book narrative, namely, the combination of the Skrull plot and Nick Fury-as-hidden-manipulator. If Fury saw a lot of this coming, it makes perfect sense that he could have set up "Steve Rogers" to be assassinated while getting the real Cap out of the way. Maybe that's even what the surrender in the last Civil War issue was all about: Fury came to Cap before the attack on the Negative Zone prison and said, "Look, it's the Skrulls, man, they're playing all you guys for patsies. Here's what we'll do--you wait until the middle of the fight, suddenly surrender, I'll sneak you out of custody and we'll replace you with a body double or a clone or something". So in the middle of the Secret Invasion, ta-da, here's Steve Rogers back again, right when things seem most dire. A grateful world agrees to revoke the Registration Act, particularly once they learn it was a Skrull plot in the first place. Etc.

I agree, though, that Quesada's horrible creative judgement plus the over-Bendisization of Marvel is keeping me from enjoying even books I ought to be enjoying.

That Nick Fury plot? Either you probably just stole Bendis' playbook, or it's just that Marvel is so hackneyed with their explanations for things now, it's easy to see where they are going. It would also, no offense to your writing or narrative skills, suck it. And mainly because I'm really sick of them taking copouts on things.

If you want to kill Captain America, KILL HIM AND KEEP HIM DEAD. If you replace him with a pretender, give me a Wally West... make the pretender end up as good as the original. Otherwise you have Bart Allen getting ganked a year after his relaunch because the writers are no-talent assclowns. Despite the good results in Hal Jordan's return, I kind of wish he'd stayed dead because Rayner had finally lived up to the Green Lantern name.

The Skrull Invasion plot has the very real possibility of allowing Marvel to unfuck all of their fuckups of the last few years by just going "LOLSKRULLZ!" Either have death and other changes like the Registration shit be real consequences or continue to do the standard formulaic stuff. This half-assed story stuff has got to stop.

You know what would be a better way to bring back Steve Rogers? Tie in Marvel 1602.

I'm not saying it's good--I'm saying that that's a natural place for them to do the inevitable. The really smart story would be to not kill Steve Rogers.

Na, the "smart" move is to make the Undertaker Captain America powered by Red Bull.

That's why I liked the beginning of Mighty Avengers.  Ms. Marvel + a dead Iron Man = :heart:.

And then he had to be... not dead.  That was totally not awesome.