Red Skull | the m0vie blog

The Death of Captain America Omnibus (Review)

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Darren

I was impressed by the original Captain America by Ed Brubaker Omnibus, but I wasn’t as blown away by his run as almost everyone else seems to have been. A lot of my problems were outside Brubaker’s control – the big Civil War event in the Marvel Universe loomed large over the climax of his run – and, in fairness to him, he worked around it as well as he could have been expected to. His on-going run is continued in a second (albeit smaller) omnibus, succinctly entitled The Death of Captain America Omnibus, which does exactly what it says on the tin, following the events which immediately followed the climax of the last omnibus (even going so far as to reprint the last issue in that volume as the first one in this volume). It’s just over half the size of the early collection – even factoring in the reprint – but I’ll concede that I actually enjoyed it a lot more. Maybe it was the sense that Brubaker was delivering a pay-off to all the threads opened in the first part of his run, or that he was solidly unfettered by editorial mandate this time around, or even that the storyline was considerably more streamlined and focused – no matter what the reason, the vast majority of my (already admittedly small) qualms about the first collection are dealt with here.

That's gonna be a pain to clean...

Continue reading →

Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Bucky, captain america, ed brubaker, marvel, marvel comics, Red Skull, retrospective, review, Steve Epting, the death of captain america, the death of captain america omnibus | Leave a comment »

Captain America by Ed Brubaker Omnibus (Review)

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Darren

There’s a lot of buzz out there suggesting that Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America might be the run on the character, the one for the ages – like Frank Miller’s tenure on Daredevil, for example. I decided that – with the movie coming out next year – it might be worth bringing myself up to speed on the character. While I haven’t finished Brubaker’s run (it’s on-going and I still have to read The Death of Captain America Omnibus), it is a very solid run, packed with great ideas. It’s a clever and well-crafted story that demonstrates that Brubaker has more in him than just gritty pulp like his fantastic runs on Daredevil and Gotham Central. On the other hand, I’m slow to call the run an instant classic – I’d rather finish his run before I make that judgement. Towards the end it feels like Brubaker’s own story has become somewhat derailed by the larger events looming in a shared universe. He’s still an amazing writer and succeeds in keeping the train mostly on the tracks, but one gets the sense that the collection would have been better if he had been granted complete control over it.