Captain America #50 – Review

By Ed Brubaker (writer), Luke Ross (pencils, inks), Rick Magyar (inks), Frank D’Amarta (colors), Marcos Martin (writer and art)

The Story: It’s Bucky’s birthday as he escapes a surprise attack by jet-packed, heat missile shooting, and fully armored right-wing extremists. Interspersed with his weaving and missile-ducking and saving the life of an innocent here and there, Bucky reminisces about  birthday bashes of years past. Lastly, we are treated to a bonus story by Marcos Martin that recounts the history of Captain America for the few individuals on earth who don’t know it already.

What’s Good: As many readers of WCBR know, I’m not a big fan of Bucky. In fact, one of the reasons I bought this title was because it looks like Bucky is depressed and ready to give up the shield on the cover. The other reason is that I am confident that this series will some how lead to the return of Steve Rogers. With that said, I really enjoyed this story of Bucky’s past. It was interesting to see his situation pre-Invaders, and the highly entertaining story of Toro’s botched birthday surprise.

Obviously Brubaker has a good handle on Bucky and is also aware of his precarious position on Captain America. I thought the scene where Bucky admits his insecurity while taking out the bad guys was a big step up from the way his self-doubts affected the story in previous arcs.

With a couple of exceptions, Luke Ross did an excellent job drawing this issue. The action scenes as usual, were crisp and accurate. But perhaps the real star on the art team this issue was Frank D’armata who really nails the palette here, in a slew of settings.

What’s Not So Good: As good as the art is on this issue, the final scene featuring the new Avengers seemed off. The team’s faces looked frozen; kinda like a group of similar-looking automatons.

Furthermore, the final flash back scene with Cap wasn’t clear to me what was going on. It seemed like Brubaker was trying to show some event of importance involving a German spy, but the relevance was lost on me.

Conclusion: A nice one and done tale. No fireworks. No dramatic revelations. Just another character study on Bucky, which I think is the main problem I have with this series of late: almost every issue is a character study on Bucky. I’d like to see some plot momentum or some new villians or something novel happen in this series. Brubaker revitalized Daredevil with new characters and contestant external-conflict for Matt Murdock. That’s not really happening here in this series as it is always focused on uncovering the past. However, as I mentioned before, I think there will be dramatic changes down the line for Captain America. The black-flag teaser and the upcoming “Reborn” mini-series point to big things on the horizon.

Grade: B+

-Rob G