Winter Soldier #11 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Butch Guice (pencils), Brian Thies (inks), Bettie Breitweiser (colors), and Joe Caramagna (letters)

The Story:  Bucky and Hawkeye close in on Black Widow as they discover that she and Novokov have started building weapons.

The Review:  Man, this is one amazing looking book.  It’s easily among the very best looking of Marvel’s line-up.  Honestly, were it not for David Aja drawing Hawkeye, I might say that Winter Soldier is the best looking Marvel book, period.  Guice’s artwork is brilliant: both detailed and murky.  The guy is borne to draw an espionage comic like this, full of conspiratorial shadows and a constant sense of claustrophic paranoia.  His layouts this month are particularly outstanding:  Guice has a lot of fun in depicting the narrative and the action and how to lead the reader’s eye across the page.  He experiments with different ways of illustrating action sequences and the result is a fun, dynamic book.  I also cannot overstate just how good Bettie Breitweiser’s colors are: her unique shifts in color do a great job in playing off of Guice’s creative layouts, leading to an engaging, creative book dripping with atmosphere.

Winter Soldier #6 – Review

By: Ed Brubaker (writer), Michael Lark (penciler), Stefano Gaudiano & Brian Thies (inkers), Bettie Breitweiser (colorist), and Joe Caramagna (letterer)

The Story: So….where the heck is that third sleeper agent?!

The Review:  Between Michael Lark’s dark, moody artwork and Ed Brubaker’s tight narration, I was really struck by how much this issue felt like an issue of Brubaker’s Criminal.  Naturally, that’s a very good thing.  It makes for beaten down characters lost in existential crisis and a general whirlwind of desperation and things constantly going from bad to worse.  In other words, Criminal is noir and so this comic is superhero noir.

Much of this issue is spent establishing new villain, and third sleeper agent, Leo Novokov.  Once again, Winter Soldier succeeds where Brubaker’s Captain America has faltered as of late, as in one issue, we have a very well-established, compelling villain with an interesting backstory and a clear trajectory from sympathetic figure to cold-blooded killer.  Brubaker manages this through a sequence of street-level flashbacks narrated by Leo, a sort of Jason Bourne meets Criminal mash-up.  It’s fantastic watching Leo slowly struggling to figure out who he is, only to have events kick in to dictate to him the answer.  The end result is a character, and a plot, loaded with pathos and ice in the veins.