I am a huge admirer of Brubaker, and he’s done a lot of his best work with Cap, so I had high hopes for this, but I am slightly deflated after reading it. It does a great job of introducing the essentials of the character, thankfully eschewing a millionth showing of the origin, but flashing back to WWII, showing him with the Avengers, bringing in Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan and Sharon Carter, giving him some action as Steve Rogers and finally as Cap.
This is another of Marvel’s Must Have bargain $5 reprints of the first three issues of what is presumably a hot series. I nearly didn’t bother with it, since I hated the last such collection, also with Wolverine, but this isn’t anywhere near that bad.
Obviously there has been a proliferation of Thor titles lately – we’re getting a bunch of collections of recent mini-series, we’ve just had a fifth Essential volume, and so on, but Marvel must be hoping that a new Thor title out now will really hit big.
Fear Itself is Marvel’s big crossover event for the next few months – I can’t tell you how many months or how many comics you’ll have to read to make sense of it, because to my surprise there is no checklist included with this. This first comic in the story is also by a different writer from the main series (that’s Matt Fraction), which also surprises me.
