Episode 64 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier by Ed Brubaker

This week We're reviewing Captain America the Winter Soldier by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting in the Marvel Premier Edition format. This was read on the Hoopla App. 

Next Week - Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross

Hosted by Vic, 

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Transcript

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Hey all, welcome to Comic Books Beyond. The show is all about demystifying comics and looking at books from a new reader-friendly perspective. You can really start reading comics anywhere, but there's better places to start than others. Hey Beyonders, welcome to Comic Books Beyond. I'm your host, Vic. This week we are talking about Captain America The Winter Soldier as uh written by Ed Bru Baker with primary pencils by Steve Epting and Mike Lark. Uh so before we start, we've got a couple little bits of news. Um so we have a big announcement that is going to change the comic books Beyond Universe Forever, which is total BS and just like I'm sick of hearing that one in comics. Uh we're on YouTube now. Uh we have been on YouTube, but we had like literally two videos up there. I was able to push the podcast up there. I only did the last couple episodes, those are my favorites. Um, and a lot of them uh might get moved up there with some tweaks. I haven't decided yet, but I like having some stuff off the YouTube channel. What we're looking to do on the YouTube channel is I actually want to give a very condensed version of some of our episodes. While we're doing this uh Marvel Premiere and um DC Compact arc of the show, which uh by my math is gonna go on for approximately a year. We're gonna do some stuff in addition to that. I I want to put some uh just more scripted versions out there, uh just just to try it and you know see how that goes. Maybe we'll get some more traffic from YouTube onto the show. Uh it I really do want to thank all the new listeners who are popping on. Like I'm kind of blown away with by how many new people have just seem seemingly shown up in the past couple weeks. Uh but yeah, that that version is gonna be a lot more scripted. This is gonna be a lot more kind of just fun hanging out random ran rambly stuff. Uh other stuff we have going on. So it is Wednesday the 12th? 10th? We'll say it's the 12th. I don't know. I don't know how time works anymore. Time is just time is not real. Yeah, it's August 12th. On August 7th, we had a uh interview with Matt McGrath up, who is a great dude. Uh very nice Canadian creator who uh is doing his own full car, which is up on Kickstarter. I really do recommend checking out both the episode and the Kickstarter if you like Full Carr. Um the price value in this one is insanely good. I paid like, I don't know, 15 bucks, and I got uh this story and like two others on his um as as add-ons that seemed appealing. I just grabbed the digital copies. I'm just running light on room, and we're looking to get rid of some stuff. Uh, I want to give a little bit of a shout out to Banger on USK uh on Blue Sky. Uh he he told me about this site called Vintage, which I'm gonna start selling some of my collection off. Nothing crazy, I'm not hard up for money or nothing like that. Uh, but anything I make off there is probably gonna be going back into the show. I just have so many books that like I have a couple versions of them, or I don't think I really need to read them again. That's where stuff's going up there. Two other just like fun things recently. I saw Spider-Man Brand New Day. It's good, it's as good as people say. I'm gonna try to put a review up on YouTube. Um, I uh I I don't have a ton more to say than isn't out there, but I just want to give my thoughts. And I really want to keep this this version of the show about comic books. So I think like when we have like a video game or a movie or a TV show we want to talk about or give a review of, I might start pushing stuff up to YouTube just because I want to talk about this stuff with you guys. And uh I have an idea for some extra content that won't be a Wednesday episode, and maybe we'll put it some version of it out there too. I don't know. All right. Oh, last thing uh I did, uh, shout out to friend of the show, Brandon McNulty, who uh took me to Haunt the Readers last weekend from the damn recording. This I got to hang out with uh two of my favorite writers, Christopher Triana and Aaron Beiergard. They write in the extreme horror splatterpunk genre. I met about 10 other authors. I got to see uh Brandon uh moderate a cool panel. I worked line detail. Uh I got to hang with Brandon when he was doing his signing and stuff. Uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna say I was his bodyguard. Uh, I really wasn't, but you know, if anybody asks, like that's what I was doing there. Uh definitely want to go back next year. I was only able to stay for one day uh just because of some issues we found with our car. Um but uh it was it was a great time. If you're uh interested in you know horror novels, uh definitely check out Haunt the Readers next year in Pennsylvania. I believe another version is gonna happen. This one seemed wildly successful. It was at Booby's Brewering, B-U-B-E-S Brew Brewing, and uh it's got this like haunted castle vibe. I didn't even go to the cool parts of it, but the but some of the parts of it were just a lot of fun, and I I really enjoyed it. Um but yeah, I I walked away with a lot of books. So I'm gonna start doing more novels. So maybe we'll do um, I don't know, maybe we'll maybe we'll try to do it do a novel once or twice a month. Uh I'm reading right now the 13th Coyote by um or coyote. I'm not actually sure how it's pronounced in this version by Christopher Triana, and it's pretty good. It's uh horror western. It's really, really thick, so it's taking me longer than I wanted to to get through it. But we're not here to talk about uh extreme horror or anything else. We are here primarily to talk about Captain America the Winter Soldier as part of the Marvel Premiere edition. Now, this book contains uh I believe this is volume five of Captain America. Just double checking my math here. There is the original, then there's the longer run, then there is the one we don't talk about, then there is the one with Mark Wade. This was uh Captain America Volume 5, written by Ed Brew Baker. Prime, you know, let's just crack open the uh credits here and we're gonna go. So one thing I want to try to do with a podcast is just tighten it up a tiny bit. So we have issues one to six, had art by Steve Epting with Mike Lark on the flashback art from two to five. Issue number seven was Jean-Paul Leon. Uh we also had Steve Epting on issues eight, eleven, and fourteen, with Mike Perkins doing the finishes. Mike Lark was the flashback artist of 12. Uh Frank Diarmata was the color artist on It Looks Like All of This. And we had VCs Randy Genteel and Chris Ilipolos and Joe Caramagna on lettering. And it looks like Steve Efting and Frank DiArmada were the uh cover artists. Now, this volume was originally published, I believe, in 2005 through 2009. Might have been 2004. Do I still have that webpage up? That uh I hope I do. Yep, this was in July 200 or January 2005 to July 2009. So this was that tail end of high school and most of my college for me. Uh now this is one of, if not my absolute favorite, Captain America stories. Uh, I haven't read a ton of Cap, to be honest. I read Um Heroes Reborn, because that's what was when I was in like first discovering comics, and I am so sorry to anyone who knows what that is. And I've read a lot of odds and ends here and there. Uh, I read the Remender stuff, which you know is kind of like a sci-fi adventure, just kind of seemed like a weird cap story, but it was okay. Uh, I read some of the stuff that came after, and I'm really enjoying uh Zadarski's run, but I'm reading that on the app, so I'm like persistently like several issues behind. Uh, so let's not beat around the bush. This is Captain America Winner Soldier. If you're familiar with the Marvel movie, you kinda know the general conceit of this. We're not going to be spoiling anything too heavy here, but spoiler alert, Bucky Barnes is the winner soldier. Okay, we got it out of the way. Now, I don't really have any major disclaimers here, but I do want to talk about this version just a little bit. So this I don't actually fault it for. This collects issues one through six, seven, eight, and nine, and then jumps through 11 and 14, skipping issue 10. Now, issue 10 was a tie-in to House of M, which was an event written by Brian Michael Bendis. Um, it's the uh it's it's an X-Men-based event, but it's a full Marvel Universe-based event where uh Scarlet Witch says no more mutants and no more mutants are born. A little more complicated than that. I'm being incredibly reductive, but that's the general conceit, and I think every book tied into it one way or the other. And uh I just I don't like when collections do this. I understand why they did. It has no relevance to the story, they just moved it over. Now, I fully read this version on the hoopla app. Uh now I want to talk about that app really quick. Sorry if I'm all over the place today, just have a lot I want to get out of. Uh, the hoopla app is an app which is provided by your library system if they choose to participate. They may not, it costs them money. If uh you have access to it, if you have a library card, definitely check it out. It's free for you. It's not necessarily free for them, but it is a great app. And it has things like Punisher Max on there, which is not available on Marvel Unlimited and is totally out of print because Marvel are fucking cowards. Sorry, rant over. Uh now the I wish they included issue 10 just because it bothers me when they don't include things like that. Just tack it on at the end and just say, hey, this isn't actually part of the story, just happened there. I wish they did it. Rant over. Uh, I didn't have a ton of trouble reading this one. I really like this one compared to the uh Fantastic Four one we did for the reasons of this had covers. Now, I did not go back to the app and read everything there, issue to issue. I had read that in the past. I didn't read this entire run in the past, but I read like the first half of it before my uh Marvel Unlimited uh expired a long time ago. So this is a reread for me, and I'm a big fan of all the Captain America movies, really. Uh Winter Soldier is up there with my favorites. It's like one and two are my my top two there. Uh, it goes back and forth on the day. Uh one is a criminally underrated movie, two is very abruptly rated. I think three and four are just fine. Four has a noticeable dip in quality. And my friend explained to me that he has a theory that the entire movie, or at least the majority of it, was done like green screened and edited together, where none of the actors were actually on screen together. I don't know if that's true, but uh that might be why like the movie just doesn't feel great. I think it's a little bit better than people say it is, though. All right, so we're gonna talk about this book a little bit. We're gonna do some things I like, things I don't like, and give it a rating at the end. So the general conceit of this story is there is a cosmic cube that falls into the hands of the Red Skull and other enemies. Now, the cosmic cube basically has plot powers. Uh, it's ill-defined, it's kind of maguffany, and I just I'm sorry, it has plot powers. That's what it does. It it's never clearly defined exactly what it can and can't do, and it's used that way throughout the story. Uh, there's also an antithesis to Captain America, and we kind of go with like the huge revised history of Captain America on this. There's a ton of deep rich backlore to like the Super Soldier program uh that goes back to, I want to say Steve Epting was doing a lot of that. Uh, I didn't read all of that stuff. Uh older Marvel comics, I'm just a little spotty on. Uh, I've read a lot of Spider-Man and X-Men, but not too much else. Uh, and uh the history of Captain America goes back to literally the 40s. He's one of the older uh Marvel characters with the invaders, like with Neymar, the submariner, the original human torch, the angel who's not Warren Worthington. Uh, there's a lot of stuff, even if you just want to Wikipedia, it's worth reading. It's it's just kind of fascinating. Uh, so the current run of this has a lot of the other super soldiers and one specific unique super soldier coming to terms with Captain America. And normally we wouldn't spoil this, but kind of everybody knows, and it's the main conceit of the book. And if you read the freaking uh forward by Ed Brewbaker, which is very good, or Sebastian Stan, also pretty good, you will just know Bucky is the winner soldier. Bucky was Cap's original sidekick from the 40s. Uh, so what happened there was uh I don't know exactly who is writing it, but uh I think it was probably Stan Lee at the time, where they just kind of retconned that Bucky was dead. And uh uh Ed Brewbaker writes about this where he tried to find the comic where Bucky died, and some comic book guys said, well, it never actually happened on screen, they just retconned him out, and he didn't like that, so it was, you know, done. All right, so let's get into some fun things that I like and things that I don't like. Uh, we're doing our little bit of a point-to-counterpoint thing here. I love the art in this one. Steve Epting and Michael Lark are two of my absolute favorite artists. The counterargument to this, to to what I like about them, they just look good for a really spy thriller. They're, you know, they're easy to follow and just the superhero characters are pretty well defined. The counterargument is they use so much ink and they're so dark. I actually have trouble sometimes telling the non-colorful characters, just like your standard, uh, you know, your your standard run-in-the-mill people. I have some trouble telling them apart, and they're using a lot of panels here. Uh, overall, still love the art. I love seeing uh Nazis get killed. So, you know, that's something we got going on here a little bit. I'm not gonna tell you which ones. I already talked about this a little bit, but let's go a little deeper on this point. So, this book is kind of a meta-commentary criticism of bad writing of old comic books. And I know that sounds a bit of a stretch, and I don't think I would have picked up on it if I didn't read Ed Brewbaker's foreword. Now, the reason I bring this up is when you think about the early days of Marvel, those stories were super pulpy, super told in a way where you didn't need to read anything else. And I think there's a lot of merit to that, but there's lack of a cohesive story like there is now. And I am going to be the first to admit Marvel and DC, if you try to make a cohesive story, you'll go nuts. But you can see some cohesive stories. Uh, this is Ed Brubaker trying to fix a lot of that, where we are going back to the past. Like this is really paying respects to old stories and trying to make them better, which is something I would like to see more writers do. Uh, it's one thing I do really like about Grant Morrison. Uh, say what you want about the quality of their writing. They do try as hard as possible to make uh respect of the whole story, but it doesn't always work. One issue I have with this series is there's a couple issues that are just incredibly infodumpy. This is kind of a strength and kind of a weakness at the same time. A good comic book, you should be able to just look at the art and guess what's going on. Here you can do that, and then you get also this narration. And I normally love Brewbaker narration. Brewbaker is one of my absolute favorite writers. I read a ton of his image work this year. I think I've read almost all of it at this point. There's probably something I missed. And I I've been reading him off and on for years, but I went like a deep dive this year, rereading everything and just like going as hard as I could. But the info dumps here are just I feel like since they're so ingrained with what's going on in the art, it's just so repetitive. And I found myself like, okay, kind of we get the point here. And it just the the narration wasn't as good for me as some other stuff. I think that's just going to be completely, totally subjective. So I just wanted to bring that up. I want to talk about one specific issue, issue seven. I don't want to say this was my favorite issue, but this is a standalone story right in the middle of the book and the right in the middle of the collection. And it's really good. It ties back to some things about two, three issues prior, and it goes into the history of a character that I forgot existed. Uh, and it really makes me want to know more about not only that character, but all the other versions of like Captain America. Remember that Captain America is a symbol, it is an identity. Steve Rogers happens to use that title for the majority of times, and other characters you know probably used it. You if you're watching the Marvel movies, and you probably are. Uh you know, Sam Wilson is currently Captain America, and uh Bucky was Captain America for a little while, and there was, I think, another one sort of recently, but I might be making that up. There were identities after Cap went away and was more or less resurrected. That's been retconned a few times for how many different ones there were. Falcon Winter Soldier actually talked about this. I think that was the Marvel series. I liked that one for a little while and then the ending just kind of lost me. And finally, the conclusion of this story, it's satisfying and it sets something else up. So this really, this premiere collection, it's not its fault, but this one definitely does feel like the first part of a story rather than a um full satisfying meal. This is like you're waiting for you're waiting for the next course. That's basically what this comes out. I want to chat about the characters a little bit, just a couple of them. Some characters that are included in here, in addition to Steve, are Agent 13 Sharon Carter and Nick Fury. This is just gonna sound silly. I missed those characters. I just haven't read anything with them in a while. Uh, I do like this representation of Steve. He's just a little angry for my taste. I believe the arc before him is where he was done dirty, and there's a lot of stuff going on in the Marvel universe right now. This is still a very solid voice for Steve. He's just a little angrier than normal. The Nick Fury we get in here is Nick Fury to a core, and I really, really, really want Ed Brubaker to write a Nick Fury story. I don't know if he ever did. He could have just had like a Nick Fury arc later in this. He was a really solid Nick Fury, and Agent Carter was so, so well done in this series. I loved her, and I just want more of her. Like, I don't know if she actually has spinoffs, uh, but I would kill for that. So I want to talk about some of the themes here. There is the themes in here are very, very subtle and also not subtle at all. There we go, pretentiousness. This is about Steve not really understanding his own history, which I think is super appropriate for him. It's about not who to not knowing who to trust and just his memory messing with him and not believing the world around him. This is kind of a weird one, but as you get older, you just kind of go through that where I've heard every time you think about something, you you're not remembering the actual event. You're remembering your last memory of it, and it kind of like, you know, a la Fight Club becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, and it gets muddled over time, which you find yourself questioning things. Now, there's the big things in life that I don't really question. I've had conversations with people and I know roughly the beginning and the end. I don't remember the exact details, and sometimes I'm just wrong when I think about it. And like I've heard myself on recordings at work where I thought I said a thing, and I turns out I said like the exact opposite. And I'm like, well, I'm a jackass and I'm wrong. Oh well. As far as if this makes me want to read more, hell yeah. Uh, I really actually uh it's gonna sound weird. I want to actually go backwards more than forwards because they reference a lot of things in here where it's not distracting to the story, it just makes me realize there was a lot that happened before that I would just like to know what was going on the past couple months of Steve's life. Uh, I do want to keep going. I'm probably actually just gonna fire up Marvel Unlimited tonight and read a little bit more or read my book. I don't know, one of the two. So, as far as my recommendation reading for this, this is something I would probably reread. And this is something I recommend pretty darn highly. I think it's gonna be great for new readers. You don't really need to know a ton in the past, and the forward actually catches you up on a lot of the history that even I did not know. There are little references here and there that make things a little um make you realize that just there's a lot more out there, but it does it in a way where you're like, oh, I kind of want to know about that. And if you're a Marvel and Limb user like me, you know, I'm not trying to shill for them. Um, I I would uh I would be looking at the full meal on this one. I don't think I want to read every single Captain America comic. Like I have a few Marvel comics that I'm gonna do that on. It's like Daredevil and Fantastic Four, I think I'm gonna do. And a lot of X-Men and Spider-Man I have left. And honestly, maybe all of Moon Knight. Not necessarily because I love all Moon Knight that much. I do, but it's just I've read most of it, so I might as well just knock out the stuff I didn't. So yeah, this is a high recommendation for me. I really like this one. I think it's great. If you're a fan of the movie, especially, this is not a carbon copy blueprint of the movie, but you can see the lift and shift they did. To make this fit more in the Marvel universe. Really good stuff. All right, everyone. Time for the Wheel of Causality. Alright, so if you don't know what the Wheel of Causality is, it's a reference to the Animaniacs Wheel of Morality. Uh so right now we have about 22 books between all of the Marvel Premiere and Compact Editions. And if that number seems a lot low, it is because I have books we've already done pulled off, books that are reserved for others, pulled off, and books written by creators who I find to be problematic and I just don't want to give free press to. So we are going to spin, we have 22 books, and as new books come out, they're just going to get added to the wheel. If you would like us to prioritize a book, just let us know. Email us. We'll be happy to honestly bump that up pretty quick. The reason we do the wheel is just so I don't have to think about what to choose next. Uh we are, I did pull off all the Batman stuff. September's Bat Month. We're probably going to be doing a Bat book every month. Now, notice I didn't say Gotham. So books like Harley and Ivy, Nightwing, they're still on here. Uh, we're just talking about Batman, Batman days in September. We might actually have an extra episode or two in September as well. Maybe this month. We'll find out. So we are going to spin the wheel of causality. Wheel of causality. Spin, spin, spin. Give us a book, and we'll dive in. That's the Animaniacs reference. All right, we hit 10 on the wheel, which I think is going to be a DC book. What did we get? Oh, I'm excited. We're getting Kingdom Come one through, which is issues one through four from the 1996 series by Mark Wade with art by Alex Ross. Oh my god, I love that series. Uh, so homework for next week, read Kingdom Come or don't. And you know, we'll we're pretty spoiler-free. Thanks for hanging out. Check us out on YouTube. Uh, I'm hoping around the time this comes up, you're gonna get an official video from us. All right, guys, we'll see you next week. Hey, so I totally forgot to give recommendations for other stuff to read. Um, for more brewbaker and Epting, I'm highly gonna recommend the series Velvet from Image Comics. Uh, it's another spy thriller and it's really, really good. Completely brewbaker and Epting might be my favorite brewbaker story. And Epting's art for as good of it is here, way better there. Uh, for more Captain America, I'm also just gonna flat out recommend the Chipsadarsky run that's right now. I'm a few issues behind, but it's really, really good. All right, sorry about that, guys. Well, it's time to close the book on today's episode. If you're a comic book creator and you have something for me to review or would like to interview a guest on the show, please send me an email at comicbooksbeyond at gmail.com. This offer is also available to fellow comic journalists. If you're a listener and you want to submit a question, I'd happily read it on the show. Please just let me if it let me know if it's okay to read and how you'd like to be created, credited. If you'd like to get a hold of me otherwise, I'm at ComicBooks Beyond on Blue Sky Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but I mostly use Blue Sky. I am trying to use uh Instagram a little bit more though. If you'd like to show support for the show, please consider leaving a rating, review, or comment. I ask for honest reviews only, and I'm always looking for ways to improve the quality and content of the show. Alright everyone, be good to each other and stick around for some gratitude and thanks. Comic Books Beyond would like to thank John Burkle and the crew of the Talking Comics Podcast, Brandon McNulty, Lisa and Bradford from Comic Book Couples Counseling, Alex Jaffe, Jeremy Whitley, Jimmy Gasparo and the crew of Comic Book Yeti, John Clay III of Shadow and Flames with Magic Podcast, David Pepos, and all of our listeners and co hosts.