Captain America: Prisoner of War

Ed Brubaker’s run on “Captain America” has been in a slump for the past two volumes.  After spending so much time on selling the idea of Bucky Barnes as a worthy inheritor of the title and shield, his most recent adventures have cast considerable doubt on it.  Being outsmarted by Baron Zemo and having his past as the Winter Soldier outed to the world is one thing, but to have him and the entire supporting cast lose to Sin, Crossbones and their crew and have the Statue of Liberty defaced in the process…  Then it becomes make-or-break time for the writer and the character himself.  Cleverly, Brubaker uses the main story in this volume to show us that this may have been his plan all along.

After the end of the last volume had Bucky being extradited to Russia to face imprisonment for his crimes as the Winter Soldier, we pick up with him in an honest to god Russian Gulag.  Aside from providing this arc with a title, the gulag is as inviting as you’d expect from a prison filled with ex-KGB operatives, Russian mafia, former supervillains, and being run by a corrupt warden.  Everyone has it in for the soon-to-be-former Captain America, but none more so than the colonel pulling the warden’s strings.  As it turns out, there are more than just painful memories of his time as the Winter Soldier stored in Bucky’s head and that information is worth a fortune to those unscrupulous enough to use it.

Even if a lot of the prison scenes have a familiar ring to them as tough guys posture, stage fights, and plan escapes, “Gulag” is still a tightly plotted spy caper that juggles Bucky’s struggle to stay alive in prison, with Sharon Carter and Natasha Romanov’s efforts to uncover the truth and free him in Russia, and Steve Rogers’ efforts to do the same in the U.S.  Not only is it entertaining to see the resourcefulness of the whole cast on display, but there’s a density to the storytelling that makes sure the experience doesn’t go by too quickly.  There are a lot of little details to savor, such as Bucky’s prison fights, Natasha’s “errands” for the Russian mob, and Steve’s verbal throw-downs with professional Marvel douchebag Henry Peter Gyrich.  The art is also uniformly strong and even though three different artists — Mike Deodato, Butch Guice and Chris Samnee — with different styles worked on this arc, they all prove to be well-suited to all of the scenes they’re asked to draw.

However, “Prisoner of War” is a transitional volume more than anything else.  Bucky’s arc sets up characters and plot threads that will no doubt be picked up on in the new “Winter Soldier” series.  We see Steve wrestling with the idea of picking up the mantle of Captain America again throughout the volume before being told in no uncertain terms that Bucky is now unfit for the role and that America still needs an icon.  Now that I see where their books are going, I can understand the need to break down Bucky over the past few volumes.  It doesn’t make said volumes any more entertaining, though.  In fact, the character’s tenure as Captain America has been brief enough to the point that it makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place.  There have been a grand total of two stories — “The Man With No Face” and “Two Americas” — that didn’t involve Bucky reacting to, or being a part of Steve’s death and rebirth.  Though I’ll admit that the character has had an interesting arc over the years, it hardly feels like it was the one that Brubaker had originally planned out.  The end result is that he now has a character specifically crafted for the spy and espionage stories he wants to tell in “Winter Soldier,” but after showing how easy it is to outsmart the character it’s going to require quite the suspension of disbelief to accept the fact that he’ll survive the experience past the first arc.

This volume also collects a number of short stories that were published along with these issues.  Most of them are passable affairs that attempt to tweak the character’s upstanding moral image, such as the kiss he shares with the wife of a thought-to-be-dead soldier in Howard Chaykin’s “Opaque Shadows” or how he confronts the after effects of a small town that teamed up with A.I.M. to survive hard times in Cullen Bunn and Jason Latour’s “Spin.”  Paul Azaceta provides some nice art for Frank Tieri’s script in “The Exhibit” which takes an interesting idea and pretty much ruins it with a ham-fisted ending.  However, it’s Mike Benson and Paul Grist’s “Operation:  Tooth Fairy” which turns out to be the worst of the lot.  Grist’s style is perfectly suited to off-kilter characterization and quirky comedy in his “Kane” and “Jack Staff” series, but Benson’s script is a predictably simple Cap & The Invaders vs. Baron Blood affair that effectively robs the art of its charm.  Fortunately the book ends on “Crossfire,” written by Kyle Higgins and Alec Siegel with art by Pepe Larraz, a straightforward war story that has Cap and Union Jack holed up in an isolated French town trying to survive a relentless Nazi bombardment.

Though “Prisoner of War” sets up future stories involving its protagonists, and tells a decent story about it along the way, I can’t say that I’m particularly excited to read them.  I mean, I’ll be checking them out to see if the change of scenery and circumstances gives them new life but I’m still not convinced that Brubaker’s struggle against the conventions of the superhero genre are paying off anymore.  Steve Rogers spends a lot of time in this volume moping about whether he should step up and become Captain America again.  If the end result is that he keeps being outsmarted and losing to the bad guys, I can understand why he’d be reluctant to.  Because who’d want to read a story about a hero like that?