Of all the new books Marvel is going to be releasing this month, this was the one that I had the most hope for. A new book for Priest was good news, and a more action-oriented Captain America book is also something I thought Marvel needed. Unfortunately, this first issue still features a take on Captain America that I'm not interested in, and a style and plot that is much closer to what the Marvel Knights version is doing than I would have liked. Given that I've been a fan of Priest's for such a long time, I'd love to blame the majority of the problems on the somewhat lackluster storytelling and overly bulky, at times ugly artwork of Bart Sears, but the art is passable for the most part... my problems come largely from what seems like a gross misunderstanding or willful change in the lead characters, and an unnecessarily confusing ruse that is meant to explain away the changes for one of them.
Understand, I'm a Captain America fan. I know that a lot of folks just plain don't like him, or feel that he's outlived his relevance, or want him to be "edgier." It is my position that you can make Captain America a badass without turning him into a killing machine, or a hand-wringing doubter of his beliefs or what amounts to a hard-boiled right-wing government agent. Sadly, this belief doesn't seem to be shared by anyone at Marvel, and Priest's take on the character lost me about three pages in, when he starts threatening to kill a source, talking in action movie cliches and basically acting like a bargain basement Wolverine or Punisher. Then later on we have him acting pretty blase about a woman and her child being kidnapped, and kissing the woman for no apparent reason. Falcon doesn't come off much better, waving around a gun and condoning the cold-blooded murder of a bunch of crooks in his presence (and there's no last page reveal to "fix" that one). I'm not against some heroes using lethal force, but for these particular characters, who have always been idealistic, and without much in the way of provocation, it comes off as wildly out of character. Mind you, this is almost entirely down to Priest using a very confusing revelation at the end of the book that has you questioning who is who throughout the book. At any rate, even when we're sure it's Cap, I don't think he comes off well, seeming uncertain and hesitant where he should be confident and principled. (I've gotten some email on this, so let me be clear: Yes, I get the last page reveal. No, I don't think the confusion throughout the issue is worth the reveal.)
So right away I've lost interest in this book as a story of Captain America and the Falcon, because so far these characters don't resemble any version that I've had an interest in. How about just looking at it as a political/action/superhero story? Well, you can pretty much drop the last part. As with most everything coming out of Marvel now, you'd be hard-pressed to find a damn supervillain in these pages. I appreciate that Captain America, as a symbol of America, has some credible reason to be used in stories that thematically tackle the problems of America right now, but if I never see Cap fighting another generic terrorist plot, it'll be too soon. Given that one of the reasons for this book was to give readers unsatisfied by the current Captain America book an alternative, it's kind of ironic that Priest's first story also focuses on the morally questionable detaining of prisoners in Cuba, and on a prison escape at that. About the only thing that separates this book from the main title is that the costumes make a more frequent appearance. But certainly anything else of the superhero genre has been jettisoned in terms of more straightforward political/action genre style.
Priest has always done that kind of thing well, however, especially in the late lamented Black Panther series. The out-of-sequence storytelling is a little disjointed here, thanks in part to Bart Sears not really establishing time and place more effectively, but as always, it also does give the book a little more complexity that adds to the tension of the intricate plot. And the actual idea at the center of all this, that Falcon might have gone rogue and that a reluctant Captain America needs to follow him, is a good one. It's just that so many of the characters' actions as we see them are inconsistent with past portrayals or don't even make sense in the context of this issue, it's hard to get too wrapped up in the story. The attempt here seems to be to do a 24 style story, but like 24 this season, the ludicrous elements have gotten in the way of what makes such tense action storytelling cool.
My biggest concern going into this book was with Bart Sears's artwork. As it turns out, while his art still doesn't really impress me, especially in light of how good most of his work on The Path was, it's certainly not bad. The characters are weirdly bulky and oddly shaped, and the expressions Sears is capable of tends to run the limited gamut from pissed off to angry with an occasional detour into terrified, and the storytelling could certainly do with more conventional "camera angles," but there really weren't many points in the book where I looked at the art and wondered "what's going on now?" That was instead reserved mostly for the story, and while it's possible that all of this out-of-character behavior on the part of Falcon might be revealed as some sort of elaborate plan or ruse, and the political angle might give way to something different, for right now this is looking way too similar to the Marvel Knights Captain America series that also isn't really what I want to see for the character.
