I’ve got the runs: Captain America by Jack Kirby: Captain America 193-214, annuals 3 and 4, Marvel’s Treasury Special: Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles.

I’m not giving anyone any new information by saying Jack Kirby was an amazing innovator. I could fill an entire sentence with hyperlinks to pages extolling his virtue.

But there’s a specific stretch of Kirby Krazy that I cherish above all others: his mid-1970s run on Captain America, just in time for our nation’s bicentennial.

Kirby returned to Cap – he co-created the character with Joe Simon in 1941 – after spending several years away from Marvel at DC, where he introduced the New Gods, the Demon Etrigan, OMAC the One Man Army Corps, and Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth. His ’70s Marvel creations included the Eternals, the Celestials, Devil Dinosaur, and Machine Man.

The King was pretty much given free rein on Cap. Under the credits he is listed as writer, penciller and editor. Marv Wolfman is listed as a consulting editor, and later Archie Goodwin is listed as just plain “Admirin’.”

The King’s greatest contribution to the Cap mythos in this two-year run was Arnim Zola, the mad Swiss biogeneticist whose face is in his stomach. Zola has remained one of Cap’s most prominent villains. Cap’s current writer, Rick Remender, used the character in his very first arc, establishing a dimension where Zola ruled supreme over a kingdom of mutated creatures and bore a human son and daughter. No disrespect to John Romita Jr., who drew those first issues with a clear and present nod to Kirby, but it’s a hard to compete with those early Zola monsters, among them a flying glob of organic matter named Doughboy, a walking pair of giant ears with eyes, and a robot with Hitler’s brain just waiting to have Steve Rogers’ face plastered onto it.

Kirby’s run, for the most part, can be broken down into three long arcs: The Madbomb conspiracy, The Night People, and The Swine/Zola. Each finds Steve Rogers confronting one threat only to be thrown headlong into the next, larger, more fantastic threat.

Here’s a short list of some of the things Kirby had Cap confront:

-An Eastern-mystic mishmash named Mister Buda who sends Cap on a journey through U.S. history to show him “the real America,” which it turns out is in the hearts of children, or something

-A bomb that drives people mad, powered by a simulated brain

-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who puts Cap and Falcon through an obstacle course to verify their identities and test their mettle before debriefing them on the Madbomb

-The Royalist Forces of America: A group that wants to destroy the Bill of Rights to return America to pre-Revolutionary times. Their leader, the descendant of a British loyalist, blames an ancestor of Steve Rogers for the death of his ancestor in a duel, in the ultimate example of, “My dad can beat up your dad.” Also they kept mutated freaks as slaves.

-Deadly skateboard derby (This was the ’70s, after all, and the original Rollerball had just come out the year before.)

-Vagrants from another dimension who come to ours to steal junk at midnight

-A Central American dictator who runs a labor camp and has a creepy relationship with his voluptuous, halter-top wearing cousin

-A perfection-obsessed hired killer named the Night Flyer who gets around via teched-out hang-glider

-A pair of symbiotic mutants named Mister One and Mister Two. Mister One was extremely tiny and lived inside a wristwatch. Mister Two was an ogre.

-Old-school crazy, nuance-less Magneto’s lesser Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, comprised of Peeper, Lifter, Burner, and Slither (Kirby didn’t really get mutants, and he created them)

All this happened during the period when the title of the book was Captain America and The Falcon. Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson’s bond is one of my favorite things about Captain America. Cap’s story and uniform make him this deified personification of American exceptionalism. Most of the Avengers have, at some point, been written as having been in awe of him. But Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson are legitimate friends. There’s no sidekick treatment, no scenes of Cap making the Falcon run obstacle courses or teaching him lessons about what it means to be a hero through pain and difficult choices. Instead, they go on double dates with their special gals and arm-wrestle between missions like they’d just watched Over the Top for the first time (although that movie would not exist for another 10 years).

Speaking of special gals, among the supporting cast were Wilson’s girlfriend, Leila, and then-ex-SHIELD Agent Sharon Carter, who just wanted Steve to settle down and make a life with her. Kirby wrote Sharon as a far wetter blanket than she’s depicted as in modern comics. Then again, she does hold the Red Skull at gunpoint for an entire issue, so she didn’t spend the entire run as a fainting damsel.

At the same time, there are few points during the run when Steve seems to forget he’s in a relationship. Both the Madbomb and Zola storylines find him paired with other women. The first one – a sickly woman connected to the Madbomb conspirators – he appears to develop feelings for, the second one – the Swine’s cousin Donna Maria – he stammers over a bit but ultimately declines.

Additionally, Kirby’s characters have a strange habit of magically realizing plot points that weren’t revealed to them. In issue 193, Cap sees a tiny gadget wedged in an alley during the chaos of the first Madbomb and “senses” it’s the source of all the commotion. In 198, Cap breaks into a scientist’s house on a recon mission and ends up in the room of the scientist’s bed-ridden daughter, who automatically rules out Cap being a burglar, solely because he’s dressed like a roadside firecracker. The next day, he approaches her on the beach in his civilian togs riding a horse he took from the local riding academy, and she assumes – flat-out knows – it’s the same guy.

Kirby’s run also introduces Army General Argyle Fist, which may be my favorite character name ever. Fist spends the Madbomb arc scouring the Western badlands looking for Cap and the Falcon using a drilling machine called Hound-dog. If only he know what Cap realized right away, that an entire underground civilization of faux-British loyalists was hidden under a few foam rubber boulders like a Hide-A-Key left out for a neighbor to bring in the mail.

My other favorite Kirby Cap character would have to be Texas Jack Muldoon, a cowboy hat-wearing, lasso-wielding stereotype who aids Cap and the Falcon during the Night People story. If the Rich Texan from The Simpsons lost weight, it’d be the exact same guy. Yee-haw!

Jack Kirby’s 1970s Captain America run is available as a hardcover, full-color omnibus, or, if that’s a bit price-prohibitive, you could buy the black-and-white Essential Captain America Vols. 5 and 6, which include the Kirby run plus a few issues immediately before and after.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.

Special Review: Dan on All-New Captain America #1

All-New Captain America #1
Story: Rick Remender
Pencils: Stuart Immonen
Inks: Wade von Grawbadger
Colors: Marte Garcia & Eduardo Navarro

We are officially neck-deep in the Avengers NOW! era, with Wednesday seeing the releases of All-New Captain America #1, Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1, Superior Iron Man #1 and Thor #2. Of the four, this was the one I was most excited about; no offense to Lady Thor and Jerkface Iron Man.

As a quick referesher, Sam Wilson, the former Falcon, is now Captain America, after Steve Rogers had the Super Soldier Serum sucked out of him. His partner is the new Nomad, aka Ian Rogers, Steve Rogers’ adopted son from Dimension Z.

The series opens with Wilson on a mission to foil a Hydra doomsday plot, standard Cap fare, obviously. But the cookie-cutter mission is exactly what allows us to see the characters interact in the new order. Sam takes point, Ian works undercover and Steve gives orders from a boat in the middle of a lake, where he is supposed to be fishing and enjoying retirement.

If you loved the banter between Steve and Sam in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, you’ll be pleased. The commlink discussion between the two about “frills” alone is worth the price of admission. Sam and Ian’s relationship, meanwhile, is decidedly more headbutt-y. The two snipe over when it’s time to kill, who’s better with the shield, etc., which is to be expected of new partners raised in two different dimensions, one of whom just happened to sleep with the other’s sister.

Though All-New Cap is decidedly less bleak than Uncanny X-Force or Uncanny Avengers, it wouldn’t be a Rick Remender book unless every major villain were trying to destroy our hero at the same time. Keep that in mind as you reach the last page.

Before that, however, there is Batroc. Couple issues here: America’s favorite leaping Frenchman appears to have traded in his classic purple-and-yellow duds for garb that makes him look like Brown Arrow. Also, his role in Hydra’s doomsday scheme seems to run counter to the classic Roger Stern/John Byrne run, when he turned on Mr. Hyde upon realizing Hyde saw fit to kill thousands of New Yorkers. Also also, he calls Sam a diabetic burger-eater, which I’m pretty sure is racist.

The FalCap costume is a bit of a mishmash, admittedly, combining elements of the classic Cap costume (the red-and-white torso stripes), the classic Falcon costume (the wings and gloves), the Commander Rogers costume (the white star on the chest), the darker blues that generally connote substitute Caps such as Bucky or U.S. Agent, and goggles that add more red to the costume but also give Sam bug eyes. Also, if someone can tell me why the new Nomad costume looks like the Constrictor’s duds, I’ll give you a no-prize.

Nevertheless, Stuart Immomen’s art combines with inks by Wade von Grawbadger (best name ever!) and colors by Marte Gracia and Eduardo Navarro to give the book just the right amount of lightness to balance Remender’s ever-gathering darkness, for a series I intend to keep reading.

P.S.: Deadpool fans, keep your eyes peeled for a supporting character from Fabian Nicieza’s Cable & Deadpool.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Caps

Wednesday marks the debut of All-New Captain America #1, which sees Sam Wilson, formerly The Falcon, wield the shield as the new Cap, with original-recipe Cap Steve Rogers’ son, Ian, tagging along as sidekick Nomad. Rick Remender (Uncanny X-Force, Uncanny Avengers) continues writing what he started in the last volume of Captain America, while Stuart Immomen (Nextwave: Agents of HATE) picks up the art. FalCap also gets top billing in the new Captain America and the Mighty Avengers, also bowing Wednesday and written by Al Ewing with art by Luke Ross.

This isn’t the first time Rogers has stepped aside and let someone else wear his clothes. In fact, he does it every few years, for reasons varying from dissatisfaction with the government to death to, in this most recent case, his age finally catching up with him.

Below is a lineup of all the men who have filled Steve Rogers’ stars and stripes since he first got doused with Super Soldier Serum and Vita-Rays in 1941.

Sam “The Falcon” Wilson (2014-present): The Falcon was created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan and first appeared in 1969’s Captain America #117, not that long into the run of Cap’s first Marvel Age solo title (which started at 100, having taken over an anthology series). The character became so important to Cap that the book was renamed Captain America and The Falcon from issues 134 to 222, a period that featured top-shelf Jack Kirby art. Sam’s new costume is a hybrid of the Falcon and Cap duds, keeping the red, white and blue but adding wings and goggles.

James Buchanan “Bucky” “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” Barnes (2008-11): Cap’s original sidekick was thought dead for years, but it turns out he was just on ice until Ed Brubaker could think of something cool to do with him. Rogers uses the Cosmic Cube to snap Bucky out of his brainwashed state, turning him from Russian assassin to Nick Fury’s errand boy with a word. After Rogers is killed (well, displaced in time) at the end of Civil War, he gets his own Captain America costume, complete with deep-V black leather pants and a gun. Bucky keeps the costume until the whole world realizes, “Wait, this guy was a Russian assassin for 60 years, and also Steve Rogers is alive.” Barnes has since returned to his Winter Soldier duds and recently played a major part in the Original Sin crossover. 

CapWolf (1992): This one was Steve Rogers. I just like reminding people there was a time when Captain America was a werewolf. For a whole seven-issue Mark Gruenwald storyline that included fellow lycanthropic characters Wolverine, Wolfsbane, Feral, Werewolf by Night and John Jameson.

John “USAgent” Walker (1987-88): Speaking of Gruenwald, he created his own replacement Cap, Walker, in 1986. Walker started out as the Super Patriot, a flag-waving opposite number to Rogers, then was put in Cap’s place by the government, then, after Rogers returned to his old job, took up the USAgent persona and ended up on the West Coast Avengers and later Force Works. During his time as Cap, he even had his own Bucky, a character named Lemar Hoskins who took the codename Battlestar and has since faded into obscurity. After Civil War, Walker made the next logical move for a patriotic superhero and went to Canada, which at the time was short on do-gooders due to Brian Michael Bendis killing off Alpha Flight in New Avengers. For more on the Gruenwald/Walker era, read this book report.

Isaiah Bradley (1942-43; created in 2003): In the retcon miniseries Truth by Mark Morales and Kyle Baker, Project: Rebirth is revealed to have essentially turned into the Tuskegee experiments after turning sickly Steve Rogers into studly Chris Evans. Its lone survivor is Bradley, who for his trouble is captured by the Germans, imprisoned by the Americans and left severely brain-damaged and largely forgotten except by other African-American superheroes. Bradley, however, spawned a line of star-spangled fighters: His son went by the name Josiah X, and his grandson, Elijah, became the Young Avengers’ Patriot.

William “The Crazy One” Burnside (1953-1964; created 1972): One of Marvel’s first and best retcons was deciding Captain America was frozen in ice and Bucky killed after one last battle with Baron Zemo in the closing days of World War II. Essentially, the story became that Captain America was at the bottom of the ocean from 1945 to Avengers #4 in 1964. Soooooo who were the Captain America and Bucky running around in Young Men comics in the 1950s? IMPOSTORS! CHARLATANS! Meet William Burnside, a psycho hopped on Super Solider Serum who had himself surgically altered to look like Steve Rogers, and his sidekick, Jack Monroe, the man who went on to be called Nomad. Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema created the character to explain away/further convolute the plotholes created by Stan Lee, who wrote Cap’s discovery in the ice but also wrote his 1950s adventures. Burnside went on to become a white supremacist called the Grand Director and was resurrected for Brubaker’s run, culminating in a fight between the faux ’50s Cap and the faux early 21^st century Cap in which Bucky, dressed in his old Bucky costume, shoots Burnside, dressed in an old Steve Rogers costume, off the Hoover Dam.

The other ones (1945-49, written into the costume in 1977): While Burnside was used to explain Cap’s appearance in comics from 1953 to 1964, two other fake Caps – William Naslund, aka Spirit of ’76, and Jeff Mace, aka Patriot – were ascribed to Cap’s appearances from 1945 to 1949. Those men were parachuted into the uniform in What If #4, which, despite being an alternate-reality title, is considered canon. Both are dead, according to Brubaker in 2005’s Captain America #4.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.

No Fear of a Black Cap, or Why Sam as Cap Sends Me

On Wednesday night, Marvel announced that Sam Wilson, heretofore known as the Falcon, will take up the stars, stripes and shield as the new Captain America, due to events set in motion by Rick Remender in Cap’s solo title.

Now, for some of us, it wasn’t that long ago when another of Steve Rogers’ longtime cohorts, James “Bucky” Barnes, wore the costume. Or maybe you’re a little older and you remember when John Walker wore the costume, before he became USAgent. Maybe you’re really up on your Cap continuity and you know that his published 1950s adventures were retconned as having been undertaken by other dudes wearing his costume, one of whom was driven crazy by the Super-Soldier Serum. Or you remember the story of Isaiah Bradley, who underwent a Tuskegee-style Super Soldier experiment as depicted in Truth: Red White & Black.

My point is, yeah, it’s been done before, and it’ll be done again. And also COUGH COUGH – James Rhodes, Eric Masterson, Dick Grayson, Kyle Rayner, Wally West, Miles Morales, Jamie Reyes, Sam Alexander, every Robin – COUGH COUGH. Sorry, sarcastic throat tickle. You know how it is.

Of all of Cap’s partners, sidekicks, pals and body doubles over the years, Falcon is at least the most deserving of the costume, perhaps moreso than Bucky. While Bucky needed to become Cap after the Civil War to set his redemption arc in motion and find his place in the modern Marvel Universe, Sam fought at Cap’s side for much longer and has proved himself in battle more times over the years.

Also – and this is the most important distinction between the two – Bucky was Cap’s sidekick, but the Falcon was his PARTNER. For recent evidence of this, look no further than Anthony Mackie’s most-excellent portrayal of Wilson in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Sam doesn’t follow Cap around like some awestruck fanboy. The two bust each other’s chops right off the bat, like a pair of mismatched cops that have already gotten through all the “He’s crazy”-“He’s too rigid” character work in front of their angry captain. They’re Riggs and Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon 2; Schmidt and Jenko in 22 Jump Street. Hell, they’re Mahoney, Hightower, Tackleberry, Hooks and the rest of the gang in Police Academy 2 rolled into two people.

Remender writing Falcon also seems like an amazing opportunity to continue harkening to one of the craziest, most breathless, ASTONISHING, PULSE-POUNDING, ALL CAPS, END-EVERY-SENTENCE-WITH-AN-EXCLAMATION-POINT-AND-DON’T-STOP-FOR-A-CUP-OF-BENDIS-BRAND-COFFEE runs in Cap history: Jack Kirby’s stretch in the mid 1970s. Remender started his volume of Cap with a Kirby throwback story in which Steve Rogers finds himself trapped in a dimension ruled by Arnim Zola, the Nazi scientist created by Kirby in the ’70s, immediately differentiating his run from the more grounded espionage-and-intrigue of Ed Brubaker’s eight-year arc.

And while I’m not saying Remender should just rehash characters such as the Midnight People, the Swine and Mr. Budda (the latter would be a bit insensitive), it would be refreshing to revisit that sort of new-threat-every-issue, stakes-have-never-been-higher tone with Sam. Because while the Falcon has tended to be a grounding voice for Cap, he’s not immune to crazy. Remember, he spent much of his early years thinking he shared a split personality with a West Coast drug dealer named Snap Wilson, even though he grew up in Harlem and worked as a social worker. I could see Remender having a field day with that. Although maybe not, after that nonsense from the other week.

Of course, change is the order of the day for the Avengers’ big three. Marvel unloaded a wheelbarrow full of pre-San Diego news this week, not the least of which is that a woman will become Thor and that Thor will become the un-Thor or something, and that Tony Stark’s title will change to Superior Iron Man, with a West Coast move in the works a la Daredevil and the Punisher.

The key thing to remember, nonsports fans, is this: If you don’t like these changes, wait. There’s always the next creative team, and you’re likely to get your precious status quo back sooner than you think.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.

Matt and Dan Go to the Movies- Captain America: The Winter Soldier

(This past weekend saw the release of Marvel Studios newest film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. So your humble host, and contributor Dan Grote, went out to see if the movie lived up to the hype. Here's what we thought)

Dan Grote: Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a movie of basements with sub-basements, secrets with sub-secrets, ops within ops, escapes via quickly created holes in the ground, and tall buildings with really long elevator rides and easily shattered glass. And Cap and Black Widow go to all the floors.

My friend Rob called it the Empire Strikes Back of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after he saw it, on account of storytellingwise, it's easily one of the best of the bunch (up there with the first Iron Man and Avengers). But I'd compare it to a different Star Wars movie, considering the mission at the end is essentially to blow up three death stars by exploiting the womprat-sized weakness at each of their cores. Also, Robert Redford’s character finds the lack of faith of the other members of the World Security Council disturbing.

Matt Lazorwitz: While I see both those comparisons, I would liken the movie more to The Dark Knight. Both are intense, action based films with plots that mirror current political fears. In 2008, urban terrorism was a fear that permeated every day, which granted hasn’t really changed, and that film’s Joker was this idealized (for want of a better word) urban terrorist; he just wanted, “to watch the world burn.” The Winter Soldier deals with a fear that has come to the fore in the past couple of years; the fear that Big Brother is watching. In a day of Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks, the idea of terror using what the government has set in motion, or the government using that knowledge to itself instill terror, is a real one, and the film takes it to the logical endgame in a world where things like S.H.I.E.L.D. exist.

DG: Seriously, though, this movie is more than two hours long, but I would have gladly sat for three. As someone who loves Cap, especially Ed Brubaker’s run on the book, this movie gave me everything I wanted: Action heroes with dry, cool, wit; geopolitical intrigue, a WarGames reference, at least three cameos that made me smile despite my dropped jaw, what briefly appears to be an old British woman who isn’t Helen Mirren fighting people, and Alan Dale.

Most refreshingly, it was leaps and bounds better than Captain America: The First Avenger, which, let’s be honest, was a two-hour-long Act I, as much as I enjoyed it.

ML: While I haven’t read the Mark Waid mini-series of the same name (and I know I need to, especially with some real good press on it lately), this is one of the best examples of showing how Cap is a, “man out of time.” He doesn’t dwell on it, and it’s not just played for laughs, with scenes of him looking at iPods and commenting about record players, like it could have been. But the general sense of not fitting in, of not knowing who he is and where he should be, was done perfectly, not dwelled on, but always there. And the final action scenes of the movie, where Cap re-dons his World War II era costume, both show who Cap is and when he is most comfortable, but also are physical representations on the theme of the world of the past in conflict with the world of the present being crafted by Hydra.

DG: The relationships between the movie’s main protagonists are spot-on, especially between Cap and Falcon (Anthony Mackie is a fantastic addition to the MCU, btw). There's always a danger of Falcon being treated as Cap's sidekick, but that was never the case. They were always partners. And in the movie they find common ground as soldiers having a hard time adjusting to being “home,” which provides a perfect way to weave in Sam Wilson’s background as a social worker in the comics.

ML: The rapport between Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie was clear from the film’s opening scene. The two played off each other perfectly, not just in how they were written, but how they were realized by two great actors. Evans has come into his own as an actor as Captain America, and while he hasn’t done a, “golly shucks,” sort of performance, he’s always stood apart. Giving him a friend in the present lets us see a different aspect of him. And Mackie plays the Falcon as a hero in his own right, looking to Cap for inspiration but not looking at him as his boss.

DG: Cap and Black Widow make great work spouses, which is good, because ScarJo eats up a lot of screentime. It’s pretty much a team-up movie the whole way through. She and Cap even go on a Scooby Doo-like adventure in a dusty old basement with a secret room behind a bookcase (which leads to my favorite surprise scene in the whole movie).

And Cap and Fury, well, it could have ended up being more of the same from Avengers, if they hadn't removed him from the equation early on.

ML: I was also happy to see Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill given a time to shine. Maria Hill in the comics is a hard character to like, as she seems to be just to the left of classic Marvel hardass government guys like Henry Peter Gyrich, always waiting for the heroes to screw up. Here, she is Fury’s loyal right hand, and has plenty of action scenes and plenty of brains, and works with Cap and company not begrudgingly, but as part of the team.

There are actually quite a few strong female characters in the film, especially when you look at it in comparison to other superhero movies. Black Widow and Hill alone would be impressive, but when you also factor in Emily Vamcamp’s Agent 13, who doesn’t get a ton to do, other than have some great fight scenes, but is set up nicely to be the female lead in Cap 3 (hopefully Black Widow will have graduated to her own film by then), you have more women fighting then in pretty much any movie I can think of that isn’t specifically an ensemble movie about women warriors. And one final note, Haley Atwell’s brief appearance as an aged Peggy Carter is both beautiful and tragic.

DG: Directors Joe and Anthony Russo are known for their work on NBC’s Community, and you can see that show's genre-bending humor in the movie, especially when they play with tired action flick cliches like threatening a low-level baddie with a fall from a tall building to extract information.

There are a couple of shots toward the end that are boldfaced homages. Cap plunges into the water - again - and after Cap is shot in the stomach, he lies in the exact same pose He did when he was killed in the comics. And of course the scene where all the fake D.C. cops attack Fury reminds of the Blues Brothers (and, uncomfortably enough, of racial profiling).

With that same Fury scene in mind, I want to tell whoever first thought of having a car or truck flip forward and explode in movies this: I love your work, but I'm worried it's been overused, especially in superhero movies (see also X-Men: The Last Stand, The Dark Knight).

Also as you watch this scene and the rest of the movie, ask yourself: Why was Fury the only person allowed to have bullet/shatterproof glass? If I lived in the MCU, after this movie, I would invest in a glass factory; that’s all I’m saying.

Audience observation: There were at least three people in a not-that-packed theater who gasped when the Winter Soldier took off his mask. Compared to some of the other surprises in this movie, this one was horribly kept, but I’m happy those people got an extra thrill.

ML: Before we get to wrap ups and final thoughts, I figured it best to actually talk about the film’s title character, the Winter Soldier. This film is so much more than that, more than just about that one figure, but I frankly couldn’t think of a better title, and it certainly is one that is dynamic and interesting. Sebastian Stan does a great job acting with just his body and eyes. His origin works well here, fitting seamlessly into the universe that has been crafted, and Stan plays the tormented side of the character as well as he does the ruthless side. I don’t know exactly where they’re going with him in the future, but I hope we get to see more of his interaction with Cap.

DG: Biggest quibble (and I don't consider it all that legitimate a gripe): Batroc was not Batroc-y enough. I'm not saying I wanted the purple-clad French martial arts master to be a joke, but I did want him to fight with more bravado and braggadocio. At the very least yell "Zut alors!"

Random observation: In the first action sequence on the ship, when Cap takes out the first pirate from behind, I really wanted the words "Y silent takedown" to appear on the screen, because I've been playing a lot of Arkham Origins lately.

Trailer notes: I was disappointed the Guardians of the Galaxy was the same one from two months ago. Next to Lucy in my notebook, I wrote "ScarJo is LIMITLESS SPECIES." Who the hell looked at Kelsey Grammer's resume and said "How have we not put him in the Expendables movies?" I do not buy Megan Fox as April O'Neill.

ML: This film had some of the best fight choreography I have ever seen. The up close fighting between Cap and Winter Soldier was that tight, Taken style, with tremendous economy of motion, while fights between other characters was broader and more open. I like how Black Widow doesn’t fight like Cap, who doesn’t fight like Falcon. That was smartly done.

As a personal pat-myself-on-the-back moment, when Agents of S.HI.E.L.D. debuted, I observed that it felt like the season’s seeming big bad, Project Centipede, were like Hydra, and wouldn’t it be great if that played into Winter Soldier since it would be coming out near the end of the season. This is being written Tuesday morning, so I haven’t seen the new episode yet, but judging by scenes from last week’s episode, I just might have been clairvoyant.

Oh, and just in case you don’t know, stay through the credits in this one. There are two scenes like in Thor: The Dark World, one mid-credits, teasing an upcoming Marvel Studios film, and one at the end, giving a final sting to this movie. It’s 2014 and we’re nine movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe; I was shocked at the number of people who got up right as the movie ended, and more shocked at the people who left after the first scene. You stuck with it this long; what’s five more minutes?

So, in the end, the consensus here on The Matt Signal is that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the strongest entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a good film over all. On a scale of one to five, this one gets five cybernetic Soviet issue arms up.

(Post movie trip to the Bargain Book Warehouse. Yes, I wore an Invincible t-shirt to see Cap. You don't wear a band's t-shirt to their concert, you don't wear a superhero's shirt to his movie.)