So Marvel made the colossal mistake of publishing the aftermath of Captain America: Reborn before the series itself actually ended. How bush league. The House of Ideas should be the house of embarrassment and they know it. This is Captain America for Christ’s sake. But I digress, what’s done is done. No amount of griping is going to break down time and space. I will state however that Captain America: Reborn #6 should be free to make up for it but you know…
What actually concerns me is something I wrote about a while back. The death of Barry Allen should have taught us that you can actually kill a character and the world won’t come to a screeching halt. The fact that we can’t treat death with any kind of respect is almost shameful. It’s just hard not to see how money plays into the equation when it comes to my favorite characters. That’s why I’m a little apprehensive about the immediate future of both Star Spangled Avengers, because it should go without saying that the town is big enough for the two of them.
Steve Rogers is back from the dead, and like a first round draft pick, you don’t put him on the team not to play him right? How long will Steve Rogers exist on the scene without being Cap? John Stewart spent a lot of time in a wheelchair, if I’m not mistaken, until he was pulled off the shelf to diversify the JLA cartoon series. Is Steve going to spend some time on the sidelines? If so, for how long? In the end, it all goes back to what I said earlier: Bucky Barnes’ days are numbered and if you read the Who Will Wield the Shield? one-shot Captain America pretty much states as much at the end of the issue.
I’m thinking to myself how much I’ve enjoyed Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America thus far, it’s been one of the highlights in comics. I would go out on a limb and say the story has been revolutionary, however the last few months seem to rail against everything the beginning of the story was about: change. Sure, Cap is different from the experience, and America is different thanks to Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar. But when this is all over where will the players be? That’s what’s bugging me; I feel a wave of undoing coming on.
I see a future where the Avengers live in a Mansion again and Cap and Iron Man are friends. I see a future where the X-Men live in a Mansion and Xavier is in a wheelchair again. I see a complete reversion to how things were before the Civil War, before M-Day, before the Clone Saga. I see this coming and I don’t know how I feel about it.
At best, what I can hope for is a mix of the old and the new; a fresh jumping on point so that new readers can get involved. It’s only natural for a comic book universe to come up for air after going through a long and drawn out storyline. Remember the look of the DC universe after the first Crisis? That feeling of newness? If the Marvel universe can create that feeling of freshness after the storm, then I’m okay with the characters coming home so to speak. But if the next three years sees the death of Bucky Barnes, the return of Janet Van Dyne (who should be Bill Foster dead dammit) and the restoration of Steve Rogers as Captain America then I just don’t know if I can hang with that. The last few years of storytelling has generated so much fresh material to work with. Marvel could easily keep pressing forward for years to come and constantly keep it fresh. But there is that adherence to tradition that demands that the more things change the more they stay the same.
