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.

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.)