Southern Trespass: Captain America #4 Review

The unique thing about comic books, at least comic books from the Big Two that are owned by the publisher and have been around for a while (of course, whether those kind of comic books are the best thing for the industry or for readers is a whole different argument) is that writers and artists come and go, while the character remains. This dichotomy brings comic fans one of their favorite things – a continuity across years that can give some characters and titles an epic, historic feeling that supercedes the often simple adventure stories at their core – and one of their least favorite things – a continuity across years that the new douchebag creative team on a book are clearly fucking with with no regard for the character’s epic history and they’ve ruined the character and now I will Tweet a death threat and hello, Officer, no handcuffs are necessary, if you’d just read this issue, you’d see that I was right to threaten to set fire to the writer’s cat, and is that a Taser, and…

…well, you get the point.

The point being that creative teams change, and each new set of people has their own stamp that they want to put on these long-running books. And a lot of times these creators want to pay homage to a particular era from the character, which can be pretty damned varied; keep in mind that, at various times, Spider-Man has been a high school student battling street-level crime, a college student fighting more mid-level threats, an Avenger, a widely-reviled public menace, a member of the Fantastic Four, and a fucking clone… and now he’s Doctor Octopus. So if a writer wants to revisit any particular era, the story could be almost any kind, and if they want to do something new with the character, they’d need to make him a gay cowboy eating pudding or something (and I’m pretty sure if I dug far enough into the Marvel Team-Up back catalogue, I might even find that’s already been done).

All of which brings up to Rick Remender, and his reboot of Captain America following Ed Brubaker’s long run on the title. Brubaker’s reign on the title was categorized by S.H.I.E.L.D.-based espionage stories, and while God knows that he took his share of chances on the title – he killed Cap and brought Bucky back to life, for Christ’s sake – they were generally grounded, somewhat realistic stories with a classic Steranko-era feel. However, that’s not the only kind of Captain America story there is; Cap has a legacy of science fiction-style stories in his history, written and drawn by no less than Jack Kirby and Gene Colan – let’s remember that before MODOK became a comic reader’s punchline, he was created to fuck around with Cap.

Remender has clearly chosen to focus on the science fiction history of Captain America in his initial reboot story, which continues through this weeks issue #4. This is a full-blast sci-fi story, including alternate universes, alien races, spaceships, and one of the classic Captain America sci-fi villains: the Kirby-created Armin Zola. The question is: how does all this weirdness – weirdness supported by various eras in Captain America’s history, mind you – go down immediately following years and years of cold war-style spy stories?

Honestly? It’s going down hard.

In previous issues, Cap was shanghaied to Dimension Z by Armin Zola and subjected to experiments before escaping, along with an infant being kept in the lab, to later discover that the infant was Zola’s son, and that Aola had stuck an LCD screen in Cap’s belly with Zola’s face in it. Here in Captain America #4, we pick up eleven years later, with Cap still stuck in Dimension Z while Zola’s face tortures Cap by working on his longing to go home… and, given the position of the screen, presumably by mocking Cap’s penis size every time he takes a leak. Anyway, Cap has been raising the infant as his own son, teaching him how to fight using the shield, when they discover an outpost of soldiers, closer to their hideout than ever before. After a short battle against the soldiers, Cap finds a working map that could allow him to find his way back home when the Zola-Above-The-Wang starts shouting, incapacitating Cap and shrieking at the kid that he’s adopted, which is a hard day no matter how you slice it. Meanwhile and purely by coincidence, Zola himself discovers that Cap is still alive, and Zola prepares to send his daughter – the adopted kid’s sister – along with a pile of mutants to go kick Cap’s ass.

Okay, here’s the biggest problem: after years and years of spy-based stories, seeing Captain America with a screen in his chest hunting aliens that look like the Sentinals from The Matrix is just fucking jarring. This is not Remender’s fault entirely; after all, Cap does have a history of going up against grotesque villains and doing his share of time and space travel, so it’s not like he has pulled this type of story straight out of his ass or anything. But the simple reality is that, if you’re going to go from years of stories based out of a Manhattan apartment and the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, to go within 60 days to an alien world where the hero of the story not only has a Samsung Plasma in his chest, but has had one for eleven years? That is one hell of a suspension of disbelief to ask a reader to heft. It has been a tonal shift that is almost like a glass of cold water to the face – imagine going straight from Star Wars to Corvette Summer; both have Mark Hamill, but it’s gonna be a hell of a thing settling into the second story after the first.

Which is a shame, because there’s nothing in particular wrong with the bulk of story here, although some of the best of it feels rushed. Remender uses the conceit of the alternate universe and the extended stay to do something that would never be stood for in normal continuity: giving Captain America a son. Which, if you stop and think about it for more than a minute, makes a lot of sense for the character: a red-blooded heterosexual American male alive during the Great Depression and World War II? One of his primary goals in life would be to meet a nice girl, settle down and raise a rugrat or two. So this issue gives us the opportunity to see that kind of relationship, but the problem is that, by necessity, it is compressed. The kid was an infant in the last issue and learns he’s adopted in this one, so we only have a limited amount of real estate in which Remender can establish the relationship. So he does it in classic American shorthand: a good dad takes his son hunting, teaches him how to use weapons, and tries to teach him right from wrong. So what we wind up with is what could be a really interesting examination of part of Cap’s character that has never really been addressed, and we only get a cursory look at it. But at least it’s a nod at using the sci-fi framework to do something, for reasons beyond Remender saying, “I likes me some Armin Zola. He could totally watch himself pee!”

What feels like it should be the most effective part of the story is the flashback to Cap’s young childhood in New York during the Depression, but frankly even that feels like it uses as much shorthand to makes its point as it uses anything else. In this flashback, Cap’s mother is sick and they are behind on the rent, so little Steve Rogers agrees to commit a burglary to make some money… only to be guilted by his mother into owning up to the shop owner and agreeing to work off his debt. And while it is interesting to see Steve this young, and to see some of the early experiences that made him such a Boy Scout, this one in particular is so loaded with cliches it could have come from a silent movie. From the street hooligans running the streets of New York to the kindly shopkeeper who let’s Steve work rather than calling the cops, we’ve seen it all before. Hell, a good kid turning to crime to get medicine for his sick mother during the Depression isn’t exactly groundbreaking; it’s the plot to fucking Johnny Dangerously. And needing the medicine wasn’t enough, so we get a fat landlord shrieking for his rent? Hell, all he was missing was a full moustache to twirl and some railroad track upon which to tie Steve’s mom. So even here, in the interesting parts, Remender is relying on shorthand to tell half his story and make half his points for him.

With regards to John Romita Jr.’s art, well… look: I’ve gone on record saying that his stuff is not to my liking, and there’s nothing different here to make me think differently. His figures and characters are blocky to my eye, and he seems to alternate between medium shots that have next to no facial characteristics to closeups where the faces have enough fine detail lines in them it looks like they’ve been worked over by Hannibal Lecter. Romita’s action sequences are reasonably well choreographed, even though the action here is comprised of hitting a sky cow in the head and backshooting a lizard… but then there’s the splash. There’s a big splash page of Cap leaping into action and getting ready to throw his shield that is dynamic, well-drawn and would make a damn fine pinup… but when I got the the next panel, something was just wrong. And I finally figured it out: for Cap to throw the shield in the  inverted way he does, it had to have flipped over in his hand sometime in between the splash and the following panel. This is a nitpick, since having it flip over keeps the red, white and blue side toward the camera through the sequence and make it look cool, but it’s just weird enough to have made me stop in my tracks to figure out what felt wrong about it. Look: if you like Romita’s art, you’ll probably like the art here. It simply doesn’t work for me.

Remender has taken one hell of a chance in going full-blown science-fiction Captain America story on the heels of Brubaker’s more realistic and grounded spy stories. In some ways he’s taken advantage of the structure to give himself opportunities to give us details and character traits for Cap that we’ve never really seen before… but unfortunately, he’s only glossing over those opportunities, using cliches and stuff from old popular culture to drive his story and characterization for him. So the combination of those disappointments make Captain America #4 a harder slog than it needs to be. But on the positive side, this is just a moment in the long history of Captain America. As was the killing of Captain America years ago, and that got better for people. But for now? Yeah, skip it.