Review - Captain America 50

Wow, what another let down of a Cap story, I mean last months issue 49 was excellent, focusing on Sharon Carter and the emotions she has being going though since the whole wrap up of the ‘Death of Captain America’ arc, but really the past 10 issues or so have been a serious drop in standards for this book. Why? Well I think since Bucky has taken over as Cap this book has become the boring Nightwing book of the Marvel U. All the story seems to be is whiney internal monologue, ‘Oh I’m not good enough to fill Steve’s boots!’ ‘Oh yes I can! Blah, blah, blah! The other problem I have with this book is the art of Luke Ross, I mean sure it looks pretty but Cap is always flying about doing overhead flips and things like he is an acrobat (DICK GRAYSON AGAIN) I mean come on! He is a trained soldier and killing machine. He was trained up as a teenager during World War 2 and since his ‘death’ and resurrection as Winter Soldier, the assassin and Russian spy, where amongst that time was he trained as a ballerina?

The basic story of the book is that its Bucks birthday and he is being attacked by a group of original Cap lovers who think they are super patriots and who are angry that there is a new Cap in town. As this attempt on Bucky’s life is spoiling his birthday he revisits older birthdays that went wrong too. But there is nothing really added to the character with these stories. Nothing I think we didn’t know before. Also you could read this book in seriously under a minute. That internal monologue I mentioned earlier has as little as 1 - 3 captions on some pages and no other text! And this is $3.99 50th anniversary book!

There is another back up story but this is not even worth a mention really, it’s another retelling of Caps origin (like we need to hear it again.)

I know this was a sort of stepping stone for the next big 600th issue, but I’m not really looking forward to that. I’ve seen the previews and I’m not that excited. (I will post a link to these later).

I may try next months 600th issue as a last chance, I mean the first 25 issues of this book were a must read and fantastic, I really want that quality back. If 600 does not deliver this will be a dropped.

Please let me know your thoughts on the book.

Score: 1 Star (out of 5) as it has a nice cover.