Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2005)

What’s this – review déjà vu?  Au contraire; what we have here is the original Winter Soldier arc from the Captain America comics, in a series of stories by Ed Brubaker.  Even before I saw (and loved) the film, I’d heard rumblings online about how great the comic storyline was, and after I’d seen it, it was clear that this story couldn’t remain unread.

 

Luckily, I was able to track down a nice trade paperback of the collected comics with only minimal scrounging, and I read all thirteen issues in one sitting.  In other words:  yeah, I’d say it’s worth a read.  Don’t go into it expecting the movie, because it’s not, but it’s a heck of a story.  I can’t quite picturing being a longtime Cap fan reading it as it was first unfolding.

 

Let’s just get this out of the way first – the main story is completely different from the movie.  It’s super comic-book-y, with clones and magic doomsday devices and phantom Nazis.  This was my first “regular” comic book experience, and I wasn’t quite ready for how out there it is.  I’m mostly used to Doctor Who comics, which basically tell the same stories the show would if it had the budget to pull off the enormous scopes and incredible visuals.  But Marvel is a different animal.  The comics go into all sorts of wild stuff that the films wouldn’t touch, and it took a little getting used to, but I definitely enjoyed it.  However, I’ll cop to chuckling when a character would offer a big info-dump about back when So-and-So returned from the dead or lost their mind or inexplicably turned evil.  What a long, immensely complicated history they have.

 

So, we’ll stick with the basics.  At this point in the comics, as in the films, Cap is in the 21^st century.  He’s working uneasily alongside his ex Sharon Carter, trying to thwart a deviously tangled evil plan from a menacing baddie.  On the way, he’s disturbed by ghosts of his past, and he can’t figure out if they’re dreams, lies, memories.  A more tangible threat comes in the form of the Winter Soldier, a legendary assassin who seems to anticipate his every move.  With his incredible skills, ruthless efficiency, and brute force, the Soldier is a foe to be reckoned with.

 

If you’ve seen the movie, then you know who the Winter Soldier is and realize the violence, cabals, and cosmic cubes are just window dressing for the much more personal story between these two.  This is where the plot shifts from an inventive page-turner to a riveting gut-punch, where I can see why fans went into a frenzy of anticipation when Marvel first announced the title of the new movie.  Cap’s discovery of the Winter Soldier’s identity, and the comic’s slow exploration of the Soldier’s past, is simply stunning.  An entire issue is spent revealing this history through heartbreaking flashbacks framed by a dispassionate confidential report, and Cap is carried to the end of the story on a sea of conflicting emotions that threatens to rule his mind.

 

Reading the story, I realized that, as much as I loved the movie, it really just touches on the richness of this plot.  In the film, Cap’s reaction to the Winter Soldier and their subsequent interactions are spot-on, but the background of the Soldier himself is only given in glimpses.  I hope that future Captain America movies delve deeper into the revelations of this amazing arc.

 

Warnings

 

Tons of comic book violence, including a little gore, and some pretty heavy subject matter.