Well, Kirkman has done it, and in just one issue, to boot: Captain America is a superhero again. I've made no secret of my dislike of what I found to be an overwrought and very much overly serious take on the character during the Marvel Knights run of the character, and while I think that kind of thing could be done right, Marvel was having a hell of a time finding someone to do it in a way that wasn't absolutely ponderous to read. So enter Robert Kirkman, who brings to the book a style somewhere between the classic Mark Gruenwald run and his own energetic "genre with a shot of espresso" style that he brings to Invincible. There's almost too much going on, as Kirkman combines any number of interesting Cap bits into one story, but he manages to pull together these many elements pretty well, and to deliver a classic style cliffhanger as well.
Captain America is a tricky character to get a handle on, and most writers tend to err in the area of his self-confidence. Many of them make him a jingoistic blowhard whose view of America was set in the '40s and isn't going to be changing any time soon (see Jim Shooter and Mark Millar, both of whom wrote Cap as the ultimate nightmare Republican). The others go the other way and make him a hand-wringing liberal who can't take any action without having an earth-shattering crisis of ego about it (see John Ney Rieber and Robert Morales, both of whom wrote Cap as the ultimate nightmare Democrat). Kirkman hits the balance I like with Cap, which is that he does have a touch of old-fashioned in him (as we see in his choice of DVD), that he does have plenty of confidence (shown in the way that he jumps right into an assignment for Nick Fury) and, most importantly, that he enjoys being a superhero. He takes seriously his role as representative of America, but that responsibility is balanced by his absolute love for the country and belief in what he is doing.
Perhaps most importantly, and admittedly a weakness inherent in the character, he is not confronted with the difficult moral choices that patriotism brings about in the real world. Cap represents the American ideal, not the American reality, and so stories where he confronts our many foreign policy mistakes or reactionary law-enforcement really aren't what the character is meant for, because that just makes him look sillier. But stories where he's fighting green-clad terrorists with a shouted credo, where he's flying around on a jetpack, where his sidekick is a gorgeous former jewel thief? Well, in that context, Captain America is an ass-kicker and a cool guy, not an outdated symbol of a country whose reality many times compromises its actual ideals.
Which is all a very theoretical and analytical of saying that Kirkman has brought the fun back to Captain America. As an old school fan, I got a big kick out of seeing Diamondback in the picture again, and an even bigger kick out of the revelation of why she's back in the picture. I loved seeing Nick Fury recruit Cap for a mission, and Cap going on that mission and just doing the job, without a lot of extra narrative explaining his worries and doubts throughout. I also loved that, as he has done in Invincible, Kirkman pays homage to the superhero genre while providing some newer twists, including a great gag about the working stiff nature of Hydra's goons and some clever misdirection about what's actually going on with Cap's mission.
A return to old school superheroics only works if you've got the artist who can pull it off as well, and Scot Eaton and Drew Geraci definitely fit the bill. Their characters are powerful and larger than life, especially when it comes to Captain America and Nick Fury. Their Diamondback is a little overly endowed, not the generally lithe figure I remember her as, but in general I really like their character work here. I also very much appreciated their action choreography, especially the sequences where Cap goes crashing through a wall and into a handful of Hydra goons. Rob Schwager's colors are a little too saturated, as if he didn't know the paper quality he was going to be working on, but they're decent enough. At any rate, the whole creative team has really brought the sense of fun back to Cap, and this Cap fan is exceptionally happy about it.
