I've not been a fan of the new Captain America series, to say the least. I really like this character, and seeing him written as an ineffectual, jingoistic goober was just painful, especially when that portrayal came with stories that often didn't make any sense in the first place. So it is with relief that I greet a good old-fashioned alternate future where the Nazis won story, cliched though the premise might be. Gibbons writes a story that we've seen before, the notion of a world where Nazis won World War II, but he gets that this kind of thing resonates more for Captain America, who was born to fight the Nazis and for whom this defeat would be the most crushing of any possible turn of events. With Lee Weeks and Tom Palmer providing stunning artwork that brings the changed world home, this is a pretty interesting setup, and I'm curious to see where it goes from here.
The awakening of Captain America in a Nazi-controlled world actually makes for a nice contrast with The Ultimates doing their variation on Cap's first awakening. He finds himself in a hostile environment, he immediately reacts and a cool little action scene results. However, contrasting Gibbons's writing style with that of Millar's, it becomes clear that Gibbons could use a little more economy of storytelling, as it takes him basically an entire issue to do what Millar and Hitch did in a few pages, which was to establish Cap's power and prowess and put him on the run from the authority that has unfrozen him.
Gibbons spends some unnecessary time on recap here, with such cliches as "wartime footage" made up of grainy black and white images from back issues and a dream sequence wherein Captain America lets Bucky down, and Cap yelling "Bucky! Noooooooo...!" at this point induces more laughter than drama. However, Gibbons does manage to convince this reader of the seriousness of the whole thing with his view of a Nazi-fied New York, and it's absolutely chilling to consider a world where the Nazis are in this much control. Suddenly, everyone is living in Berlin in 1939, except that the Nazis have greater technology to keep the populace under their thumb.
Lee Weeks and Tom Palmer just knock the depiction of "New Berlin" out of the park, and that is what gives the controlled territory of New York such power. It looks like an industrial monstrosity, clearly evocative of the real New York skyline, but it's like a twisted mirror of that real visual, and Dave Stewart's expert colors, painting the whole city in a shade of deep red, heightens the mood. Weeks is also a consummate storyteller, and I look forward to getting to see him do more action sequences later on, given how good the brief ones are in this issue. I question the occasional choice, such as the borderline goofy slave girl outfits that Red Skull has outfitted his women with or the more Silver Agey, less modern version of the Skull's costume, but in general, the art looks fantastic.
There are some elements of "Cap Lives" that feel a little bit hokey, but for every one of those elements, there are a couple others that just feel right. I'm still hoping for a regular team on Captain America that will balance the traditional and the modern styles of writing the way Mark Gruenwald or Roger Stern did when the book was at its height, but in the meantime, this mini-series within a series looks like a breath of fresh air for those of us who can't stand the modern, mopey style of Captain America that has defined it since the book moved to Marvel Knights.
