Captain America: Loose Nuke


By Rick Remender, Carlos Pacheco, Nic Klein, Klaus Janson, Mariano Taibo & various (Marvel/Panini UK)

ISBN: 978-1-84653-578-9

After spending twelve years in the hellish Dimension Z, raising a child and saving the indigenous people from the depredations of insane Hitlerian über-geneticist Arnim Zola, the Star Spangled Avenger finally returned Earth with the experimenter’s turncoat daughter Jet Black to discover mere hours had passed in the “real” world.

The extra-dimensional life sentence had cost Steve Rogers too much. As well as his boy Ian, on-again-off-again girlfriend Sharon Carter had also perished in the rescue bid which returned him to a world he barely remembered and no longer felt a part of…

Collecting issues #11-15 of Captain America volume 7 (November 2013-March 2014), the breakthrough saga begins with ‘A Fire in the Rain’: opening in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility where doctors work to remove the last vestiges of Zola’s pernicious poisons from Cap’s battered body.

As the hero dwells on his dying mother’s words, uttered in their Depression-era New York City hovel decades ago, the medical expertise of Henry Pym and Bruce Banner excise the final remnants of a virus which was slowly growing a clone of the Nazi’s consciousness inside Captain America: a biological Fifth Column furiously fighting for control of the weary body.

In recovery the doctors and S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Maria Hill acknowledge that, despite a dozen relative years having passed, Rogers still looks like a young man. The Super Soldier serum that originally created him might well have made the Avenger immortal…

Jet meanwhile is being brutally debriefed by the new movie-compliant Nick Fury Jr. (long story short: he’s the African-American son of the original – see Battle Scars for further details) but is compelled to let her go when Cap arrives and has her remanded to his own custody.

The super-girl bred and trained for war saved his life in Dimension Z at great personal cost and he is determined to give her a decent life in the strange new world they both feel lost in…

Meanwhile in the eastern European state of Nrosvekistan normal daily commerce is grotesquely interrupted when a bare-chested madman with the Stars and Stripes on his face begins wantonly killing men, women and children. Frank Simpson, AKA Nuke, underwent many top secret procedures at the Weapon Plus program to turn him into a Captain America for the Vietnam generation.

Sadly the result was a drug-addled super-psychotic obsessed with American casualties who now wants to win all the wars his proud nation lost or walked away from… just like the recent peace-keeping mission to this Balkan backwater…

In Brooklyn, Rogers moves Jet into his memento-stuffed apartment but, still unable to reconnect with his distant life, subsequently torches every scrap of his past before turning his face to the uncertain future…

The extended ‘Loose Nuke’ saga then opens with a chilling flashback as determined devoted socialist Ran Shen literally wakes a sleeping dragon to gain the power necessary to reshape the unforgiving, disappointing world.

In the now, the Falcon calls on Captain America to learn the shocking details of his extra-dimensional odyssey and realises his closest friend is on the edge of a nervous breakdown…

In Nrosvekistan the army has been deployed but cannot match the manic ferocity of Nuke and his as yet undisclosed backers. The conflict is about to become a major political embarrassment for the USA, however, as Daily Bugle freelancer Samantha Chan – on the trail of a clique of missing billionaires – films the bloodbath and attempts to post it online…

And in China Ran Shen – now called the Iron Nail – plans amidst the satisfying horrors of his punishment camp: a hidden mine where greedy exploitative capitalists are made to toil and die in the conditions they have forced on billions of others across the globe…

‘Live Weapons!’ fills in some backstory as in 1969 the original Nick Fury confronts a S.H.I.E.L.D. sleeper agent who appears to have changed sides and joined Mao Zedong‘s inner circle. Moreover Ran Shen then tried to oust the Chairman and failed, making him persona non grata everywhere…

When Shan used the dragon’s power to escape S.H.I.E.L.D. custody not even the cunningly infiltrated soviet Winter Soldier was able to stop him…

Once more in the present, Falcon takes a call to get Captain America ready for action somehow. Images of a madman slaughtering civilians and planting American flags over their bodies are about to go public, and Maria Hill needs a true icon of the nation to be seen ending his rampage if her internet blocking strategy fails…

She also needs someone to stop a freelance reporter from dropping America into another potentially lethal media firestorm by any means necessary…

The resulting battle of ideological wonder warriors further decimates the battered little country and serves to give Cap even more reason to doubt the point of his existence, especially since, after subduing the psychologically impaired and pitiable Nuke, Rogers resolves to find out what made a patriot into a monster…

From his hidden realm, former S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Shen is pleased that his ambition to drive an Iron Nail into the heart of the West is proceeding. Thus he causes his unwitting deluded pawn to detonate like his namesake in the very heart of his hated foe’s citadel, whilst simultaneously activating the long-dormant and extremely classified Weapon Minus test warrior: an LSD-dosed, psychedelic psychological super soldier codenamed Dr. Mindbubble ready, willing and extremely able to share his terrifying sensibilities with the wider capitalist world…

To Be Continued…

Written by Rick Remender and illustrated by Carlos Pacheco, Nic Klein, Klaus Janson & Mariano Taibo, this blockbusting battle of ideologies is augmented by a covers-and-variants gallery from Pacheco & Dean White, Jim Cheung & Laura Martin, Leonel Castellani and Francesco Mattina, plus AR icon add-on sections which allow the Marvel Augmented Reality App to grant access to story bonuses once you download the code – for free – from marvel.com onto your smart-phone or Android-enabled tablet.

Fast, furious and ferociously controversial, this long-overdue examination of a patriotic icon with a conscience representing a nation which has increasingly sidelined its people is a welcome twist that should challenge and delight fans old and new alike.

™ & © 2013 and 2014 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. All rights reserved. A British Edition published by Panini Publishing, a division of Panini UK, Ltd.