How do you humanise an ideal? The burden of a legacy? How do you come back from loss? When dreams shatter and keep on shattering? How do you recover from rock bottom when you have burdens to bear?
This is a truly iconic run by Captain America; it is almost a cliche that we use the phrase “nothing ever was the same”, but this is exactly the case for this run by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. It follows Steve Rogers going through loss after loss and fighting on through, having old traumas split open in an effort to break him, but at the same time at his very best as he stands tall through it all. But for the first time we are more privy to his relationships outside the Avengers as well as his efforts to blend in, to not be just a symbol, but also be one of the people but bearing the weight of being the symbol of a whole nation.
The artwork by the latter is among the most dynamic I have ever seen – the fight scenes all through the run feel cinematic as ever, pulled straight of a spy thriller. In fact I would hazard to say that most characters work best this way – a merging of tropes. Ed Brubaker does this perfectly, especially in this genre of spy thrillers. Captain America is not just a superhero, but a soldier and an operative and above all, a human being.
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