By David Morrell & Mitch Breitweiser with Brian Reber & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2016-2
The Sentinel of Liberty 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 unstoppable, overwhelming overnight success.
The absolute and undisputed star of Timely – now Marvel – Comics’ “Big Three†(the other two being Human Torch and Sub-Mariner), he was amongst the very first to fade as the Golden Age ended.
When the Korean War and Communist aggression gripped the American psyche Steve Rogers was briefly revived in 1953 – along with Torch and Subby – before sinking once more into obscurity…
A resurgent Marvel Comics drafted him again in Avengers #4. It was March 1964 and Vietnam 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 World War II, the resurrected Rogers stole the show, 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 a precarious and rapidly changing modern world.
After decades of vacillating and being subject to increasingly 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…
That view was superbly taken to its most impressive extreme in an evocative 6-issue miniseries under the adult-attuned Marvel Knights imprint. As explained in David Morrell’s fascinating Afterword to Captain America: The Chosen, the author of First Blood (the original Rambo novel, and many others such as The Brotherhood of the Rose and Fireflies) jumped at the chance to play with America’s other abiding patriotic symbol…
Running November 2007 to March 2008, Captain America: The Chosen takes a simultaneously down-to-Earth and metaphorically fanciful look at the nation’s saviour which begins in ‘Now You See Me, Now You Don’t’ as Marine Corporal James Newman takes heavy fire after his patrol enters a seemingly quiet village in Afghanistan.
He’d rather be home in San Francisco with wife Lori and baby boy Brad, or at the very least just certain who the bad guys are and who the victims American like him are here to help, but a furious assault by Al Qaeda insurgents soon drives all thoughts other than survival out of his head.
Pinned down in a house he thinks his time has come until Captain America suddenly appears. The hero’s mere presence drives doubts away and steadies his fear. With the mighty crusader’s inspirational assistance – always repeating a mantra of “Courage. Honour. Loyalty. Sacrifice†– Newman breaks out of the trap and rescues his endangered men from certain death.
In the aftermath the weary Corporal ducks the thanks and praise of his grateful comrades, attributing the lion’s share of credit to the Star Spangled Avenger. He cannot understand where Captain America vanished to, nor why nobody else saw him…
And thousands of miles away in a secret laboratory a Super Soldier lies dying…
The mystery deepens in ‘The Shape of Nightmares’ as a bevy of scientists assess the Sentinel of Liberty’s rapidly declining state in the very building where he was created, whilst in Afghanistan Newman ruminates on the apparent hallucination which saved his life one day ago. As his squad investigate a cave his mind goes back to his own childhood, a time when an innocent game trapped him in a car boot and almost killed him. The event left its mark and he’s terrified of entering the hole in the ground which might hold all manner or peril…
The threat comes from enemy combatants with grenades and a brief fierce firefight results in a rock-fall which buries the squad under tons of rock. As Newman radios for help with mounting panic, Captain America is there again calmly repeating “Courage. Honour. Loyalty. Sacrifice.†None of his fellow survivors can see him as the superhero explains what’s really going on…
In a secret US citadel a paralysed Captain America is linked to radical technology. His perfect body is dying as the serum which created him fails, but has linked his still valiant mentality to experimental Remote Viewing equipment to provide strategic intel for the American forces in combat.
It’s fortuitously also allowed him to contact kindred spirits like Newman but being ‘Out of Body… Out of Mind’ is only the start. Despite being also able to terrify many particularly receptive insurgents, his time on Earth is ending…
As the entombed soldiers slowly expire in the collapsed caves, Cap’s calm discourse again inspires Newman and the claustrophobic Corporal begins digging deeper into the mountain looking for a way out.
‘Fear in a Handful of Dust’ follows as he strives, accompanied by an ever-more skeletal patriotic phantasm. Perhaps to keep him steadied, Captain America tells James how it all started: how a skinny physical specimen, rejected by the army, was transformed into the perfect soldier during World War II, of the friends he made, the family he formed and the losses he endured for the sake of his country and the world…
As Newman burrows through the mountain Captain America shares the most intimate details of his life in ‘The Crucible’ of service, but as the Corporal stubbornly overcomes every obstacle, on an operating table the Spirit of a Nation is dying…
The saga ends as the President rushes to the side of America’s greatest resource. The hero’s mind is elsewhere, imparting details of his return after decades frozen in ice and the new world he found himself lost in, further triumph and sacrifice and his recent decline into frailty and powerlessness.
And how he knows one thing above all else: Captain America is not unique and a ‘Multitude’ of good people like him can be united to carry on his work. He has been patiently seeking them all out whilst his life was leaking away…
As Newman inches his way to sunlight and freedom the communication suddenly ends. He has no idea that a world away the Star Spangled Avenger has seen one final crisis and overcome the body that has betrayed him to save America one last time…
Scrabbling into the open air, the Corporal is ambushed by insurgents but somehow seems imbued with the energy of a superhero triumphing over impossible odds to save his men. He isn’t tired and knows this is only the beginning…
Moving, mythological, elegant and illustrated with sublime understatement by then-newcomer Mitch Breitweiser (ably augmented by colourist Brian Reber), this powerful paean to symbolism also offers Morrell’s complete script for the first chapter and a superb gallery of a dozen covers-&-variants from Breitweiser, Travis Charest & Julian Ponsor.
© 2007, 2008 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.