My worry--maybe worry is too strong--my concern with Ed Brubaker's Captain America is with his plotting. He seems to be building towards something, instead of creating some kind of new status quo. With some of the Captain America stories (not the issues not starring Captain America, which are by far the best of the series), Brubaker seems to be recreating, tonally, 1970s Captain America comics. Guest-stars, villains, cool-looking stuff. Except his overall direction seems to be toward something grandiose and grandiose tends to fail for Brubaker. I'm thinking of his last Catwoman story, which took a couple years and he was so disappointed in it, he quit. (I think that timeline's correct). Captain America has the added problem of figuring directly into Marvel's continuity, so who knows if something along the way won't ruin Brubaker's intended direction?
That concern voiced, I have another one, a much more immediate one. I can't tell what's going in this story, Twenty-First Century Blitz, because Steve Epting's art is too damn dark. I realize the night scenes are supposed to be dark, but really, your eyes adjust in the dark, which Epting doesn't take into account. At least once an issue, I was puzzling over something going on in the story because I couldn't make out what was going on or who was in a particular frame. Additionally, out of costume, Captain America and guest-star Union Jack are both a couple blond-haired white guys and they're hard to tell apart. Only in the last issue did Union Jack start to look different (but Captain America wasn't around, so who knows?). My last problem with the art--and I don't know if this one's Epting's fault or if I'm just out of superhero comic book habit--but Captain America looked really silly in London in his costume. Real silly. So did the Union Jack guy. For some reason, the photo-realism of Epting's art clashed heavily.
I feel like I'm harping on this story and I'm not. Brubaker's Captain America has its problems, but it's a sturdy, competent comic book. It doesn't wow and I don't expect it to start doing so, I just want it to stay of a consistent quality and not fall apart or something. That statement made, I really need to say something about the big battle scene. Not only is it hard to see what's going on, it's an attempt at an action-packed movie scene (people yelling, fast edits) in a comic book. I kept wondering what the hell I was reading during the edits and the yelling, but once the real attempt at pacing--at forcing the reader's reading speed--I got close to perturbed. It was really a silly, bad move and for something so pedestrian (for his talent), Captain America seems to be rather problematic for Brubaker to get a handle on.
