Captain America: Winter Soldier Dossier Edition


By Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, John Paul Leon, Michael Lark & Tom Palmer (Marvel/Panini UK)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-579-6

The Star Spangled Avenger was created by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby at the end of 1940 and confidently launched in his own title Captain America Comics #1, cover-dated March 1941. He was an overwhelming overnight success.

The Sentinel of Liberty was the absolute and undisputed star of Timely – now Marvel – Comics’ “Big Three” (the other two being the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner), and amongst the very first to fade as the Golden Age ended.

When the Korean War and Communist aggression gripped the American psyche in the 1950s Steve Rogers was briefly revived – along with Torch and Sub-Mariner – in 1953 before sinking once more into obscurity… until a resurgent Marvel Comics called him up again in Avengers #4. It was March 1964 and the Vietnam conflict was just beginning to pervade the minds of the American public…

This time he stuck around. Whilst perpetually agonising over the tragic heroic death of his young sidekick (James Buchanan Barnes AKA Bucky) during the final days of the war, the resurrected Steve Rogers stole the show in the Avengers, then promptly graduated to his own series and title as well.

He waxed and waned through the most turbulent period of social change in US history, constantly struggling to find an ideological niche and stable footing in the modern world.

After decades of vacillating and being subject to increasing frantic attempts to keep the character relevant, in the last years of the 20th century a succession of stellar writers finally established his naturally niche: America’s physical, military and ethical guardian…

This powerfully subversive saga, written by Ed Brubaker and mostly illustrated by Steve Epting, collects Captain America volume 5 issues #1-9 and #11-14 – spanning January 2005 to April 2006 (#10 being part of the altered reality event House of M and sensibly omitted here) – and features the opening sallies in a truly vast and expansive examination of the character: one which would result in the Sentinel of Liberty becoming a rebel, a traitor, an outlaw, a corpse and, eventually, a messiah…

It would also rewrite one of the founding precepts of Marvel history whilst making the notoriously reactionary fans love it.

And yes, Captain America: Winter Soldier Dossier Edition has been released to tie in with the upcoming movie release. Deal with it. That’s the only way publishers make money selling comicbooks these days…

The 6-chapter ‘Out of Time’ opens in the wake of a catastrophic but ultimately inconclusive clash with the Red Skull (part of the crossover Avengers Disassembled) but actually begins with a flashback to five years earlier, when the Nazi nemesis bargained with ex-KGB General Aleksander Lukin: an ideological hardliner turned arms-dealing Oligarch selling off mothballed experimental technologies and secret Soviet weapons to finance his plans in the world after Communism.

The Skull is particularly interested in a vintage suspended animation capsule, but is unwilling to trade information or access to the reality-warping Cosmic Cube for it…

In the present, the Skull broods on his next scheme to torture and destroy Captain America.

He has spent much of the intervening half-decade meticulously gathering shards and fragments and now possesses the barest shell of a Cube. It still needs fuel and time to fully reconstitute itself…

Rogers is not doing well. He feels responsible for the Avengers recent dissolution and the death of so many of his comrades and has begun morbidly dwelling on the past. Episodes from World War II where he and Bucky battled together blend into cases from after he was thawed out of a block of ice to find himself in a future far more dangerous than he ever believed possible…

The grim, world-weary and rather shell-shocked Star Spangled Soldier is beginning to worry his nearest and dearest with his uncharacteristically excessive actions and ill-judged behaviour. Especially concerned is former girlfriend and senior S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Agent 13. Sharon Carter questions him about the brutality of his recent actions in stopping a terrorist plot to destroy Coney Island but doesn’t really accept his answers…

As he settles into his new civilian apartment, the brooding, inconsolable old soldier is completely unaware that the Skull is watching his every move. That surveillance comes to a shocking end when a sniper’s bullet ends the monster’s life and a mystery intruder steals the skeletal framework of the Cosmic Cube …

When Cap is alerted to his arch foe’s death he refuses to believe the news and his own narrow escape, even after the extensive autopsy and corroborating evidence. Moreover, he’s increasingly afflicted with memories of his WWII service, but now the memories are paralysingly traumatic and sometimes include events that never happened…

Investigations reveal the Skull had also been planning cataclysmic conflagrations in New York, Paris and London with the resultant loss of life used to power the wish-fulfilling Cube, and when an anonymous call alerts Nick Fury at S.H.I.E.L.D. the peacekeeping agency explodes into action.

As Captain America and Sharon tackle a super-bomb beneath Manhattan they encounter opposition from Skull loyalist Crossbones and a dissident wing of AIM (the original creators of the Cube) but triumph regardless.

Cap heads for Paris to spectacularly stop the next device and crush another division of Advanced Ideas in Destruction, but in London Union Jack and his S.H.I.E.L.D. team only find the Fascist Fury’s forces slaughtered and the final terror weapon missing…

And in Pittsburgh, Cap’s former partner Jack Monroe AKA Nomad is abducted and murdered…

On Wall Street, Lukin’s far reaching plans are slowly coming to fruition, but devoted comrade Leon is worried. Even as the Oligarch successfully takes control of American energy conglomerate Roxxon his aide harps on that the General’s use of the diminished and curtailed Cosmic Cube is somehow affecting him…

With dreams and hallucinations still plaguing him, Steve is then informed of another atrocity and rushes to Arlington National Cemetery where the graves of the other two heroes to serve as Captain America have been desecrated. He is unaware that Fury and Sharon are keeping an even nastier surprise from him…

When he leaves, Cap is seized by a violent memory flash of himself and Bucky being tortured by Baron Zemo in 1945, just as the vengeance-crazed Crossbones attacks. The brutal thug had been tipped off to Cap’s whereabouts by an anonymous Russian…

Elsewhere the gun which killed the Skull has been found. It’s covered in the fingerprints of sometime S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Jack Monroe. When Sharon tracks him down she walks into a trap…

By the time Fury and Steve reconvene, the grizzled spymaster has compiled a skimpy file on Lukin which prompts another memory flashback: recalling a particularly horrific event in Russia in 1942. The Star Spangled ex-Avenger begins to connect the dots between himself, the Skull and the Russian…

The first story arc concludes as Steve investigates the British fort where Bucky died and which features so strongly in his “wrong” memories. He still doesn’t realise Fury is keeping something from him but gets the message when he returns to the USA and rescues Sharon from her mysterious metal-armed assailant.

It’s another trap. As Agent 13 warns him that the elusive killer looks like a grown up Bucky and the killer waiting in ambush opts not to shoot, the Skull’s missing super-bomb detonates, eradicating a large part of Philadelphia, charging up Lukin’s Cosmic Cube…

The ongoing saga then takes a moment’s pause as Captain America #7 explores the ghastly final months of a hero who had lost his way in ‘The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe’, illustrated by John Paul Leon & Tom Palmer.

Once upon a time in the 1950s the eponymous sidekick had been taken under the wing of William Burnside, a deranged fan who turned himself into a duplicate of Steve Rogers and briefly played Captain America whilst the original languished in icy hibernation in the arctic.

As a student Burnside was obsessed with the Sentinel of Liberty and had diligently divined the hero’s identity, reconstructed most of the super-soldier serum which had created the Patriotic Paragon and even had his own features changed to perfectly mimic the Missing-In-Action legend.

Using the serum on both of them, Burnside volunteered their services to the FBI – who were then embroiled in a nationwide war on spies, subversives and suspected commies – and he and impressionable young Jack seamlessly became Captain America and Bucky returned; crushing every perceived threat to the nation.

It soon became apparent however that their definitions of such included not just criminals but also non-whites, intransigent, uppity women and anybody who disagreed with the government…

After some months the reactionary patriot had to be forcibly “retired” because the super-soldier serum had turned him and Monroe into super-strong raving, racist paranoids.

Years later when the fascistic facsimiles escaped their suspended animation in Federal prison they attacked the real, reawakened hero only to be defeated by Cap, the Falcon and Sharon.

Although Monroe was eventually cured and even worked as an assistant to the original (as well as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and solo vigilante), Burnside’s psychosis was too deeply rooted, and he returned many times to tangle with the man he felt had betrayed the real America.

Now Monroe faces his greatest trial: medical tests have revealed that the ersatz Super Soldier serum has degraded in his system, destroying Jack’s immune system, causing blackouts, hallucinations, blind rages and worse.

The dying wannabe has little time left and only wants to make his last weeks count by taking out an insidious drug ring, but he can’t tell what real and what isn’t and doesn’t even remember where he is half the time…

With the poignant, tragic interlude concluded the overarching epic resumes with ‘The Winter Soldier’ (issues #8-10 and 11-14, illustrated by Epting with Michael Lark handling the flashback scenes in #9)…

Now realising that a great part of Lukin’s plan is simply to make him suffer, Captain America resumes the chase, determined to bring the devious Russian to justice, but before that a deep secret is revealed as, in April 1945, an experimental Soviet spy sub commanded by Vasily Karpov picks up the maimed body of Bucky Barnes from the seas where it fell.

The ambitious Russian spymaster has dreams of extracting the fabled Super Soldier serum from the corpse but is doubly frustrated to discover that the indomitable young warrior was never treated to the formula, and is also not quite dead…

In New York in the now, Captain America has seen the dossier Fury has been hiding. Using modern facial recognition techniques and by collating a half a century of security and surveillance photos, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s boffins have managed to prove one of the spy trade’s most fantastic spook stories…

From the 1950s until the late 1980s the Soviets reputedly employed an infallible “ghost” assassin all over the world; infallibly using murder and arranged accidents to secure the KGB’s aims. Moreover anybody can now see that between 1955 and 1976 the identified killer aged less than five years…

The face is Bucky’s and the last photo is from airport cameras near where the gun which killed the Red Skull was found.

Billionaire mogul Aleksander Lukin was Karpov’s fanatically loyal KGB protégé, heir to all the brainwashing secrets and obscene scientific treatments that must have turned a valiant American boy hero into a ruthless cunning killer…

Forced to accept the horrible truth, Steve and Fury organise an illegal raid on Lukin’s recently purchased private country, only to find they have been outfoxed again. The new owner of US conglomerate Roxxon has already bought his way into the highest echelons of the White House and is far beyond the reach of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the living embodiment of American courage and integrity…

Unfortunately for the triumphant Oligarch his stolen tool is cursed. The malignant, restored Cosmic Cube not only affects his mind but actively moves against him, placing the KGB’s full files on Winter Soldier into Captain America’s hands.

Lukin determines to get rid of the treacherous and far too dangerous Cube, ordering his increasingly rebellious living weapon to bury it in the deepest, most secure hole on the planet, whilst Steve, armed with knowledge and bolstered by real memories of what his former partner was, enlists comrades-in-arms the Falcon, Iron Man and Sharon to help him intercept his former friend…

Sharon is happy to help: after all, even though Cap is aiming to save and restore his lost friend, she knows there’s only one sure cure for a multiple mass murderer like the Winter Soldier…

With a covers-&-variants gallery by Epting & Joe Jusko, Winter Soldier Dossier Edition is a huge and hugely entertaining, stellar Stars and Stripes Fights ‘n’ Tights saga: a bombastic blockbusting, blisteringly good yarn for lovers of suspenseful action drama and recent converts familiar with the filmic iterations of the flag-wearing franchise.
™ & © 2005, 2006 and 2014 Marvel & Subs. Licensed by Marvel Characters B.V. through Panini S.p.A. Italy. A British Edition by Panini UK Ltd.