Captain America #1

"Castaway in Dimension Z," Chapter One
written by Rick Remender
pencils by John Romita, Jr.
inks by Klaus Jansen
colors by Dean White

Opening the debut issue of a relaunched series with a startlingly visceral scene of domestic abuse is a daring move. His mother's proud, if perhaps foolish, defiance of his father, an unemployed, abusive drunkard, sets Remender's series' precedence for his hero's conduct against adversity, one that is rather predictably reiterated as Rogers later repeats his mother's advice, "You always stand up."  Despite its sobering beginning, most of Captain America #1 hits several solid, if not particularly clever, punchlines, significantly lightening the tone of overall issue.  Right on cue, as a cute young woman tries to flirt her way out of a speeding ticket by arguing the urgency of her date because "it's not like strong, sexy men...are falling from the sky," the Cap parachutes down, bad guy in tow.  Recognizing himself the inevitability of comic book timing, Rogers remarks to the police officer's question about the plane, "Give it a second," and as if summoned by the Marvel gods, it crashes precisely then.

Steve Rogers is exactly the kind of red-blooded American to stir a 40s-era, wartime imagination:  immigrant, blond and blue-eyed with an unexceptional, WASPish name, even if he's really Irish Catholic; blue-collar and wholesome; and, above all, doggedly upstanding and honorable.  He's the kind of hero whose weapon is a shield.  But he's also the kind of idealist who continually risks chronic naiveté.  The very characteristics which make him so admirable make it increasingly difficult to imagine him fitting in with contemporary sensibilities.  One of Remender's best achievements in the premier episode of his run, though he by no means the first to do so, is to make Rogers convincingly, rather than unbelievably, virtuous without abandoning his roots in a long-past era of American culture.  That, as Captain America, he has second thoughts about doing the right thing in saving Green Skull, the outlandish but deadly eco-terrorist villain of the first action sequence, is necessary to ground his character in a familiar moral territory, however simple a move it is.  Similarly, his relationship with Sharon Carter—though it's rather creepy that she has exactly the same hair as his mother—cutely plays with this cultural discrepancy:  Rogers' poorly executed innuendo, Sharon's marriage proposal, and jokes at the expense of his old age.

While most of the issue delivers reliable conventions, there are a few that gain a bit more traction.  It's not particularly original, but the idea of an inter-dimensional express train to Zolandia which uses abandoned subway stations—built, of course, during Rogers' lifetime—and actually deposits passengers is intriguing, and well-executed, culminating in Romita's beautiful, full-page alien-landscape of the Zolandia port.  Although the Captain's escape from Zola's lab was somewhat boring and predictable, the issue's final twist, an act in keeping with his rescue of Green Skull, is both surprising and promising.

[January 2013, digital]