Captain America in the 2000s
The 2000s for Captain America were transformative as styles and attitudes toward the character and what he represented changed. It was a very turbulent decade given what was going in the world at the time, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The decade started off with the continuation of the third volume of the series. Writer Mark Waid had just handed off the book to Dan Jurgens. Jurgens continued to work with artist Andy Kubert. Kubert who was hitting a high point in his career would continue to draw on the book until issue #31, with the occasional fill-in artist coming everyone now and again.
During this period Jurgens had told a number of multi-part stories. The first, in issues #25-27, Twisted Tomorrows saw the return of Nick Fury to the book and had Cap going up against the Hate-Monger, a clone of Adolf Hitler. This was followed up with a bizarre four parter that took place in issue #28-31. It involves Cap going to the Savage Land to find Sharon Carter who went there with a talking dinosaur she nicknamed Barney. There they stumble upon Count Nefaria who is performing experiments on people so he can create a race of ionic dinosaurs to use an unlimited energy source for his own powers. It’s a really weird story which also involves a fake out where Ka-Zar and his wife Shanna appear to be rapidly aged to death, but it later turns out to be clones. Of course, because this was a story taking place in the Savage Land, it gave Andy the opportunity to imitate the style popularized by his father, Joe, for stories of this style.
Starting in issue #32, Jurgens took on the dual role of writer and artist. Jurgens is a decent artist in his own right, but it really depends on who he has on for an inker. Anyway, the next bunch of issues (#33 to 38 and the Y2K annual) focused on Advance Idea Mechanics discovering Protocide, an early test subject of the Super Soldier Serum that was kept in suspended animation and was kept in a top secret government storage facility for decades. They thaw him out and revive him and send him against Captain America. It’s not necessarily a bad story, but contributes to the growing woodwork of other Super Soldier Serum recipients further muddying the point that Steve Rogers was the only Super Soldier created during World War II. It’s very much Marvel’s version of Superman being the last son of Krypton, yet there seems to be a lot of Kryptonians running around, but I digress.
There were only a handful of issues left of Jurgen’s run after this. The only one worth talking about is America Lost a four part story that took place in issues #45-48, but even then it’s just another generic Captain America saves the country from the Red Skull boiler plate, with the added appearance of the Hate-Monger. It takes the John Byrne Hate-Monger trope — a shape-changer who can stoke hatred in all groups — to destroy America. Like many writers before him, Jurgens raises the alarm about hatred and extremism in American being the ultimate destruction of the country. Given the state of America today, where accelerationist Neo-Nazis are regularly committing acts of terror in the hopes of stoking a race war, it seems that not many people have been listening.
The series was coming up to a huge re-launch pretty soon, so the second to last issue was used to tie up loose ends as Captain America had a love triangle going on that was going nowhere fast between himself, the lawyer Connie Ferrari, and Sharon Carter. Since Sharon Carter is the character we still regularly see, I don’t think I need to tell you who Steve picked in the end. What astounds me though is how after Jurgens get Cap and Sharon back together in issue #49, another writer comes in an undoes that an issue later. Seriously? At least Brubaker fixed this a few years later.
Issue #50, the final issue of the 3rd volume was part of Marvel’s ‘Nuff Said month, where nearly every book published that month featured a story with no dialogue and relied on visuals to tell the tale. The story in Captain America that month wasn’t anything to write home about. A softball story where he fights Absorbing Man at Christmas time and something about a family. It’s so unremarkable that I kind of already forgot what it was about and I just recently read it. The back end
What’s odd about this issue is that it is jammed with a bunch of back-up stories (that do have dialogue). The last three Relics, A Moment of Silence, and Stars & Stripes Forever written by Brian David-Marshall, Jen Van Meter, and Evan Dorkin respectively. It tells a tale where Captain America is seemingly killed during a Neo-Nazi terrorist attack. There’s whole show where children find out at school and cry, followed by a huge memorial and funeral piece where a sea of guest stars talk about what Captain America meant to them.
Which doesn’t really have much of an impact since the “killing Captain America” fake out for departing writers and creative teams has already been done three or four times at this point. You know the character is going to be brought right back again.
They also never get into how Captain America cheated death this time around, but does it really matter at this point?
However, this was more of a symbolic death because this story was published in the months after September 11, 2001. For those who are somehow in the dark about that date, it was when terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands of Americans. It kicked off the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, and a 20+ year occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing the moment American troops were pulled from the country. Anyway, September 11 fucked a lot of people up. Understandably so. If you didn’t experience it personally, you saw it played over and over again on the news. Live television brough tragedies like the Challenger explosion and the Columbine Massacre, but that shit was a family picnic compared to 9/11 and watching two huge monuments to American capitalism collapse like a house of cards with people still trapped inside.
Just prior to that, there was an American election and after a narrow margin and a contested final vote, Republican George W. Bush beat out running Democrat Al Gore. Before 9/11, George W. Bush was viewed as a nepotic blunderer on the fast track to become a lame duck President. 9/11 was a dream come true for a life time loser like Bush whose only real accomplishment was being born into enough privilege to fail upward into one of the most powerful positions in the world.
See, the thing about Americans is that because they are so far removed from the rest of the world, the idea of wartime violence reaching their shores is something that doesn’t even cross their minds. They have this might-means-right attitude where they figure that given the USA’s military might, nobody in their right mind would dare attack them. If there is a conflict overseas they just shrug and tell allies its their problem to deal with. They only got involved in situations where there was some financial gain behind it. America does not selflessly get involved in conflicts elsewhere unless there is money to be had, or for revenge.
What Americans still don’t grasp is sometimes the enemy is willing to kill themselves in order to strike at their country. It was true when the Japanese sent Kamakazi pilots to attack Pearl Harbor during World War II and it was true about the al-Queda terrorists that hijacked the planes on 9/11. These were ideologically driven individuals who willingly gave up their lives in the name of their cause. In both instances, despite intelligence agencies warning that an attack of this sort was about to happen, Americans just shrug their shoulders and went nah, not here, this is America, and nobody would dare try and hurt us.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories about how 9/11 happened — as if pissed off terrorists flying planes into buildings wasn’t enough of a conspiracy — all from this idea that the attacks were manufactured by the government to gain support of a war. They’re all stupid. Why detonate a building, or replace commercial airliners with decoys, when you could just let the thing that happened actually happen instead? I believe there was a conspiracy, but it’s not what you think. It was a conspiracy of ignorance, arrogance, and hubris. America got its nose bloodied on that September day because they didn’t take the threat seriously. They thought “What area those sand n-words going to do to hurt the might of the American military machine?”
At any rate, when the attacks did happen, suddenly everyone decided the best thing to do was to support the lame duck President as he steered his War on Terror away from the real threat (al-Queda and Osama Bin Ladden) and used it to settle an old family grudge against Saddam Hussain who — yes, was a despotic dictator — had nothing to do with 9/11 in the slightest. The American people were frothing at the mouth to get revenge, something really easy for them to do when their attackers were non-white foreigners. It was enough to support a lame duck launch a lengthy and expensive forever war in the middle of a god forsaken desert. The mastermind behind the god damn plot wasn’t even caught until a decade later, under the next guy’s watch (THANKS OBAMA). This conflict is still technically raging today and has claimed over 900 thousand lives and over 8 trillion dollars. Of those deaths, about 15 thousand of them were Americans and not just soldiers, but contractors, humanitarians, and journalists. About 5 times the amount of lives that were lost on 9/11. Yeah, those 3000 people had families and lives and deserve justice, but what came out of it was not worth the cost. Yeah Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are dead, but the Middle East is most fucked up than ever as a result and the people there are inventing new extremist groups with new tactics that are eager to fuck America’s shit up again, but I digress.
At the time, Marvel was already taking their books into new directions. Phasing out the usual dialogue heavy and continuity laden tales of yore for more “cinematic” experiences. With advances in imaging and printing technologies they could use the visual art as a story telling method. There was also a push to make the stories more accessible to new audiences. A happy medium was struck between maintaining long time readers and attracting new ones. This was the era of multi-part yet self-contained story arcs. Long time readers didn’t have to deal with much in the way of (ugh) retcons and new readers could hop in and out of storylines without needing to know more than the basics about the character. It was fertile ground for a relaunch.
Marvel was also farming out their less successful books to outside creative teams as part of the Marvel Knights imprint. They had already hit success with relaunches of Daredevil, Black Panther, and the Black Widow, and were expanding the repertoire. Captain America as a book was doing a lot better following the debacles of the 1990s, but needed that extra push to bring up sales, so Cap too was getting his own Marvel Knights book.
9/11 kind of happened while things were in transition and what was originally planned for the book was scrapped so they could do stories that tapped into that then-recent tragedy.
What does all mean? Well it impacted how Marvel chose to depict Captain America. While the character had represented the American Dream for decades at this point, the character started off as — essentially — war time propaganda. He was a tool to get Americans to support the war effort a good year before America first entered World War II, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
After 9/11 happened, Marvel kind of brought Captain America back to his roots as a propaganda tool to convince people to support a war in a far off place. Not that American’s needed much convincing this time around. If you look at American media from this period, from all areas of the political spectrum was support, everyone was a patriot, everyone supported the troops, supported the moron on the oval office. You had to support because we were at war. Not many people were overly critical of the plan or what was being done overseas — like, Michael Moore and a handful of others — those who did were usually tarred and feathered for not being patriots.
Marvel relaunched Captain America with a fourth volume that was dripping with so much patriotic imagery it would give a southern Republican a hard on. Writer John Ney Rieber and artist John Cassaday were brought in for the revamp. Cassaday’s work is beautiful even though they are dripping with unironic patroic covers that harken back to the days of World War II. However, the kind of blind patriotism you’d expect to find based on the covers aren’t actually found.
Yes, there is the obligatory issue spent showing Captain America sifting through the wreckage at Ground Zero. At first, it appears that you’re going to get some boiler plate pro-American story where Captain America fights a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists to save the day. It looks like its going that way when the first five issues focus on Captain America going up against just such a terrorist named Faysal al-Tariq. However, by the end of the arc, Captain America is faced with the fact that these terrorists are targeting America because of previous wrongs committed to their homelands. The second arc, had Captain America go up against Inali Redpath, a Native American SHIELD agent that suddenly turns on his country.
At a time when most everyone was pro-patriotic and were blindly supporting the War on Terror, Rieber was holding up a mirror to America itself. To its various violent interference in other countries. Be it regions of Central America, Africa, and the Middle East, there are places where America has come in and done damage all for their own self interest. Sometimes it was for a valuable commodity like oil, other times it was something as petty as wanting cheap bananas. America has done some shady and vile shit for their own ends.
These stories weren’t exactly empathizing with terrorists so much as it was pointing out that America isn’t exactly the lily clean nation most Americans see it as. It has committed atrocities. It has caused civilian deaths for deplorable reasons. Most times they have gotten away with it because they are a world superpower. It asked the question how is America any different than the countries where the terrorists came from.
This point is really driven home with the second arc, titled “The Extremists”, given that the character is a Native American who is pissed about how European immigrants stole the land of his ancestors. Again, pointing to America’s colonial past and comparing it to 9/11, is America really all that innocent? The point, again, isn’t so much to empathize with the terrorists, but to be critical of America’s past wrong doings and that at some point these wrongs will come back and bite the entire nation on the ass.
The the interesting thing about Reiber’s arc is that it got totally derailed by 9/11, the series was going to still have Captain America questioning his government and focus on that, but then the terror attacks happened and Marvel wanted to push things in that direction. The work that was already done was retooled to fit a post 9/11 narrative. With the first arc of the run being torpedoed for a new one involving terrorists and the World Trade Center. Reiber’s intended exploration began shortly thereafter.
Reiber’s run on Captain America generated a lot of controversy and eventually he was off the book. His two storylines after Enemy would be finished by another controversial writer, Chuck Austin. When asked about, Reiber stated that he was taken off the book due to creative differences between himself and then editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, who had a specific vision of what Captain America should be and Reiber’s version of the character didn’t fit that.
Unfortunately, whatever John’s original vision was for the rest of his run was ultimately lost as Chuck Austin towed the company line. All of the villains that Reiber created went from complex characters to forgettable bad guys of the month who have never been used again.
Another odd choice was that Reiber was also working on a Captain America limited series called Ice with artist Jae Lee. This title was supposed to be set in a different continuity where it was revealed that Captain America was frozen by the government on purpose because he was against the nuclear bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Ignoring the fact that this was already an idea that was done in Heroes Reborn, why Marvel then decided to fold this into the main continuity of books instead is baffling because it required heavy re-writes just to be usable. Not to mention the fact that the ending was left open ended so the plot could be hand waved away at the first opportunity (more on that later). I guess things were really behind with all the re-writes and sudden change on an already delayed book that they had no choice but to grab whatever was ready to go and could be reworked on the fly.
This entire period of Captain America is a hot mess of half finished ideas and walk backs. It’s really disappointing to read because there were some interesting ideas there that would have been worthwhile to explore at the time, “creative visions” of who and what Cap is or isn’t be damned. I would be very interested in reading the original scripts that Reiber written to see where they went. They had to have been better than the cop-out nonsense we got instead.
The series was then handed off to Clint Gibbons and Lee Weeks who did the four part story arc Captain America Lives Again! Set in a timeline where the Nazis won World War II after Captain America went into suspended animation. The story has Captain America revived some in the 1960s and he joins up with the resistance to stop the Red Skull. The only thing this story really suffers from is being truncated to four issues. After the big reveal and introducing the cast of characters we are rushed to a conclusion. Gibbons is usually a pretty competent writer but the ending is rushed. It involves the Nazis building a time machine and ends with Captain America going into the past to stop this nightmare future from happening. However, it’s never clearly explained how the Nazis won the war, nor do we see how Captain America prevented those events from happening. For such a heavy subject, I think more count have been done with it.
From there, writer Robert Morales and artist Chris Bachalo dive back into the post-9/11 world, with Homeland, a five part story that sees Captain America asked to be part of the jury in sentencing an Iranian immigrant on terrorist charges on Guantanamo Bay. The guy is innocent, but some real terrorists break out and take hijack the guy to Cuba where they intend to let off bio-weapons. We then have Captain America going in to Cuba to assist in capturing the terrorists and neutralizing the threat. The is an odd story in that Morales tries to inject some humor in the story by having then Cuban leader Fidel Castro appear in the story as comic relief. It doesn’t work for me TBH. I am a fan of Chris Bachalo’s work but here there are some edges that needed to be straightened out. The most distracting thing about his work here is that Captain America’s proportions keep on changing from panel to panel. It’s inconsistent the entire run and it becomes distracting.
Bachalo joins Morales for one last issue, The Bucky Issue where they hash out one of those old nerd arguments you’ve heard before if you’re a dinosaur like me. The whole “Why would Captain America let a kid like Bucky fight alongside him during World War II.” Keep in mind that this was well before Brubaker brought Bucky back as the Winter Soldier. In those times Bucky was only seen as the annoying kid sidekick from old Timely Comic reprints or the reason why Cap was so emo in his early appearances. Bucky was always portrayed as a young teenager in those stories. It wasn’t until 2005 that Bucky was recontextualized as being in his late teens and early 20s during World War II. At any rate, this story is just belaboring a talking point that had already been long in the tooth at that point and is now irrelevant today, so reading it is a kind of a chore.
Morales then paired up with Lee Campbell for a two part story, Requiem where Captain America teams up with Isiah Bradley, aka the Black Captain America. This character was introduced in Truth: Red, White, and Black. In the early 2000s, Marvel had a big hit with Origin, a series that finally told the origins of Wolverine. It was such a hit, Marvel decided to try and catch lightning in a bottle a second time. They did Truth which looked back at Captain America’s origins, World War II, and race relations in the 1940s and tossed them all into a blender. It’s something you have to read yourself to really get, but it did give us the Black Captain America. However, Requiem features Cap interacting with the Bradley from another reality where he didn’t suffer brain damage and became that world’s Captain America. A better world by all appearances.
The Morales run is one of those runs that tries to start something but quickly backtracks as the creative team finishes up and the next team wants to start fresh. In this case, it is the introduction of a new love interest for Steve Rogers, Rebecca Quan. This is the first time that Steve has been in a romantic relationship with somebody that wasn’t of European origin and I was all there for it. It would have been interesting to see how that would have went, but Quan’s romance with Steve was over even before Morales’ run on the book was.
The fourth volume of Captain America then comes to a close with one final story arc. This one was written by Walking Dead and Invincible creator Robert Kirkman with artist Scot Eaton. It’s branded as part of the Avengers Disassembled storyline, but it is very, very loosely tied in to what Brian Michael Bendis was doing over on the Avengers. Anyway, in the middle of all of the Bendis insanity, Captain America still had time to go off and do his own thing not only in his own title but also in the Captain America and the Falcon spin-off series. Not only was Cap fighting the evil copycat called Anti-Cap, he was also fighting the Red Skull while also romancing the Scarlet Witch and a LMD of Diamondback for…. reasons? Anyway, other than briefly hooking Cap back up with Diamondback there’s not really a whole lot going on here. Kirkman’s story is interesting enough but nothing substantial happens. You could have removed the Avengers Disassembled branding and nothing about the story would change.
Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting were the shot in the arm Captain America had needed. Their landmark five year, fifty issue run also had some assistance from artists Mike Perkins (issues #15-17, 22-and 22-24), Butch Guice (issues #35-36, and 47-50), Rob De La tore (issues #39), and Luke Ross (issues #43-45). By this time, Marvel had long tufted the Comics Code Authority in favor of their own in-house rating system. Finally, depictions of World War II could be more or less unfiltered. As much as one can respect what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were doing for the medium in the 1960s, their depiction of World War II was — and I’m trying to be charitable here — childish at best. Wasn’t their fault, it was the Code. Oh sure, you could have war comics, but they couldn’t show the reality of war. The human collateral. Forget even explaining what Nazi concentration camps were for. Even as the Code became more laxed in later years, World War II was always treated with kid gloves with very few stories doing more than just toe dipping in the horrors that were experienced therein. Most of the time it was usually American navel gazing at how they (incorrectly believe) that they single handedly won the war. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they outright showed what happened in the camps until a back-up story in Namor the Sub-Mariner Annual #1.
You especially didn’t see much realism in the pages of Captain America. Up to this point the closest we got was the story in 1979 about how he freed his future landlord Anna Kappelbaum from one of the death camps. Even something as harrowing as that was still staunchly sanitized either by editorial or the Code. Brubaker changed all that by revisiting World War II frequently during his run. He did so with historically accurate references and an unvarnished look back at the death and destruction sold in that era. However, inserting Captain America in to a realistic World War II setting and not having it look silly is very hard to pull off and I don’t think Brubaker could have done so without the right artist to do the visuals. Steve Epting was the right choice. His renderings really represented the cold and harsh wastelands and bombed out cities during the war. Everything was meticulously researched and everything was historically accurate. Even the brightly garbed super-heroes were rendered in a way that made them still stand out, but alos didn’t make them look ridiculous.
Another impressive thing that Brubaker was able to do was bring Bucky Barnes back from the dead. When I first heard this back in 2005, I scoffed at the idea. This was back in a time when characters who died usually stayed dead. Even then, there were two characters that long time readers could always count on always being dead were Bucky and Peter Parker’s beloved Uncle Ben. To a lot of people, Bucky’s death in 1945 was an integral part of who Steve Rogers was in the present day.
The other question people always brought up was why would someone want to bring him back from the dead to begin with? Bucky was always depicted as a dopey teenager who was more of a Boy Scout than Captain America was. In fact, in the 1940s during their hay day, they kept skewing Bucky younger and younger, particularly in Young Allies stories. By the 1990s and 2000s he was mostly regarded as a joke when compared to other characters who came after him. Sure, we can buy that Captain America would have the balls to stand up to the Thanos, or the Beyonder, or whoever, but Bucky? You’re out of your fucking mind. That goofy kid would get his ass kicked by everybody.
I think that Brubaker recognized that for people to not only accept a Bucky resurrection, but also like the character he would have to reframe who Bucky was and update him for the times. He went back to the drawing board and went with the most historically accurate way you could explain a teenager become Captain America’s sidekick. Suddenly, the usual “I discovered your secret identity and now I can blackmail you” origin was dumped in favor of James being trained in anticipation of being Cap’s partner. He didn’t stumble upon it by accident, he god damn earned it. Although the old stories weren’t just retconned out. They were recontextualized and presented in a different light. Instead, the original version of Bucky discovering Cap’s secret (as depicted in Captain America Comics #1) was now a propaganda film and the whole “boy sidekick” thing was a PR move to encourage children to enlist in the military once they became of age. As always, a writer worth their salt doesn’t discard old stories when making major changes, they make it all work in one way or the other.
I think this also paved the way for Marvel to incorporate their Timely and Atlas era stories more closely to the main continuity of post 1961 Marvel.
Also a concept that was mentioned in passing before (in the Adventures of Captain America limited series) was put into practice. Bucky posed as the doofy boy sidekick, but that was merely a cover. Bucky would also do solo operations that were too sensitive for a public figure like Captain America to get involved in. The military brass was fine with him leading the troops in to battle, but they needed someone more covert to do wetwork and black bag ops.
Brubaker also wisely chose not to resurrect Bucky, just have it so he never died to begin with.
There were a lot of important tales told in this run. Such as the importance of Captain America and what he stood for in a post-9/11 world where civil liberties were in threat and the American reality became more deeply militarized. The Red Skull became less a villain-of-the-month, but a much more sinister and complex villain than ever before. He stood as a metaphor for all of America’s ills: political corruption, corporate greed, and xenophobia all bundled together into one neat package. Brubaker used the Skull as a foil to examine some very real life issues that were plaguing America then, and still to this day: The 2008 mortgage crisis, growing wealth inequity, civil unrest, crumbling infrastructure, and politicians that are becoming far more extreme in their right minded political position. Willing to be courted by a literal Nazi if it meant winning an election. I wouldn’t say that Brubaker entirely predicted the Donald Trump Presidency, but he certainly predicted that atmosphere that allowed it to happen. Thankfully, in the Marvel Universe such a politician was shut down hard and exposed.
Expanding further on the world’s need for Captain America was of course the three act Death of Captain America storyline, which saw the apparent death of Steve Rogers. This followed Civil War, which was a fight over superhumans having to register with the government. It was the perfect metaphor for the War on Terror and Patriot Act era where Americans butted heads about civil liberties and the need to be safe. How much of your freedom were you willing to sacrifice to prevent the off chance there was someone on your plane with a bomb? It’s funny to look back on that era now and how Americans were willing to swallow taking their shoes off at the airport as being ok, but these same people frothed at the mouth at the idea of having to wear a god damn mask during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Captain America was presented as a champion of civil rights in that story and realized that the American public disagreed with him. A lot of people focus on Captain America rebelling against tyranny when they look back at this. What they forget is that he surrendered when he realized that he was wrong and his position wasn’t supported by the vast majority of Americans. Something that far right personalities seem to forget when they recall back to this story. But their views of who Captain America is and what he represents is warped to begin with, so it’s no wonder they get the important parts wrong, but I digress.
Then we saw Captain America get killed and we saw a world that was trying to come to terms with his loss. It certainly didn’t make America see the errors of its ways. While this was more directly addressed outside the pages of Captain America in the various events that were happening at the time (Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and Siege being the big ones). Brubaker let other books cover America’s descent down the darker path. Instead he zeroed in and focused on Bucky’s transformation from the Winter Soldier to Captain America. The long road to get there, and how hard it was to be Captain America. Bucky would eventually win public approval by exposing the Red Skull’s latest scheme, but it was not to last.
I’d say that the only thing to dislike about Brubaker’s run is just how short a period that Bucky spends as Captain America. Oh sure, it lasts until the early 2010s, but the moment there was a new Captain America movie on the horizon, Steve Rogers was quickly back in the saddle. I think that’s the only negative consequence to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is that stories are saddled with the ever increasing need to be similar to the movies. Oh sure, we get the Winter Soldier in the MCU, but we don’t get to see him as Captain America. While, that role deservedly is now going to the Falcon, it would have been interesting to see James Barnes as Captain America around for a little longer than a hot minute. However, this was before Marvel hit on the idea that they could have multiple characters operating under the same codename in different books. Something that didn’t really strike hot until Miles Morales was a hit as the new Spider-Man. Sadly, this came just as the James-Barnes-as-Captain-America ship had long since sailed.
Another disappointing turn was a subplot involving Sharon Carter being pregnant with Captain America’s child. This plot thread ends in Marvel’s time honored tradition of an unwanted pregnancy: A miscarriage. However, this one was more brutal than most since it happened at the end of a combat knife. Where I can understand them not wanting someone like Spider-Man have a child, the idea of keeping Captain America childless doesn’t make any sense to me. I suppose it is what it is. It’s odd considering that they’ll give Steve a child — of a sort — a few years later in the 7th volume of Captain America. But even that’s kind of a fucked up relationship because he’s the test-tube baby of one of Cap’s enemies. But I digress.
The decade closed off with Captain America hitting a few milestones. Marvel celebrated Captain America’s 65th anniversary, followed by his title hitting its 600th issue (technically). To celebrate this milestone the series went back to its legacy numbering after issue #50. It’s here that we close off the decade. Issue #600 looks at a world that has changed one year after the death of Steve Rogers, however it would springboard over to the Captain America: Reborn limited series which saw the eventual return of Steve Rogers. To not give away the ending to that limited series, Bruebaker did a few filler issues to close out 2009. Issue #601 is a flashback story from World War II involving vampires. This is a notable story as it saw the return of legendary artist Gene Colan, who was the guy to draw vampire stories at Marvel having worked extensively on Tomb of Dracula back in the day. This was one of Colan’s final works at Marvel before his death in 2011. I guess it was a sign of the times, but the story ended with a page explaining who Gene Colan was, which is kind of sad. People will always remember Jack Kirby, or Steve Ditko because their names are constantly spat out by the hamster memory of the Internet over and over, but you have to remind people who Gene Colan was.
Captain America in the 2000s was a turbulent one as the character went through growing pains to define who he was and what he stood of in a changing world. Something that writers hadn’t really have to do since the 1970s when Steve Englehart wrote the character. There were a lot of missteps along the way, particularly the mess that was the 4th volume. However, it didn’t take them long to start getting it right. It wasn’t about reinventing Captain America for a new audience, it was going back and recontextualizing his past in a way that respected the continuity but also presented the character in a way that was captivating to the modern reader.
