Captain America: Patriot 1 & 2

A recent trend at Marvel has been exploring their Golden Age legacy, with mini-series and continuity implants. These have usually been thoroughly researched, carefully constructed, and mind-buggeringly dull.

Avengers/Invaders? Tolerable but disappointing.

Torch? What was going on in that, anyway?

Invaders Now!? Not impressed yet!

Marvels Saga? Pardon my coma….

Now, at last, comes a “retcon” that gets it right, not in the tired, “Everything you knew is a lie!” sense, nor the painfully Roy-Thomas “Why did Captain Turnip’s mask switch from full-face to half-face in 1943?” sense (some people just own more than one hat, Roy…), but in a way that puts heart, rather than obsessive history or hollow spectacle, at the core of the narrative.

Just after World War II, Reporter Jeff Mace, the costumed hero known as the Patriot, is rocked by two revelations. The death of the Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America – and the fact that the man behind the mask was not the famous warrior of World War II, but a stand-in, recruited to save America’s morale.

Jeff is no super-soldier, and already outclassed by his metahuman comrades in the Liberty Legion – but nevertheless he steps into Captain America’s boots, and finds that living up to a living legend is even harder than he imagined.

The Patriot, a long-running hero of Marvel’s Golden Age, was never more than a cipher, but Kesel cunningly plays on that by having him directly inspired by a chance meeting with Cap to don his own set of tights – making the ‘reveal’ of Cap’s death, and the substitution, more poignant because of Jeff’s inspiration.

Jeff is presented as a man consistently out of his depth, not just heroically, but romantically. He’s inveigled into a fake romance with colleague Miss America, to distract the media; he ignores his friend Mary Morgan, a.k.a. Miss Patriot’s, efforts to stand by his side; and he remains oblivious to the growing attraction between him and shapely FBI liaison Betsy Ross.

Despite his general down-to-Earth cluelessness, he unfailingly does the right thing, whatever the cost to him… and, halfway through this four-issue series, that cost looks to be mounting up.

It’s talky; there’s sufficient action to keep fanboys interested, but the beauty of the story is the dialogue. These aren’t just costumes with powers, but people, well-intentioned yet all too flawed and fallible, inside the costumes. Kesel’s skills imbue each character with a distinctive voice; the brittle and sophisticated Mary Morgan, disclosing an aching loneliness and vulnerability with every tossed-off bon mot, is particularly well done, but she’s only one standout in a line of convincing personalities.

Mitch Breitweiser’s art is a delight; not slavishly imitating the Post-War period, giving it the nailed-down ‘historical’ feel that sabotages similar projects, but imbuing it with a vitality evoking the era, yet involving the reader with events that are taking place very much ‘in the now’.

Unfortunately, the fact that it centres on an obscure facet of the Captain America mythos, and that’s it’s being released as one of a slew of cash-in Cap mini-series to milk the movie franchise, would seem to condemn this gem to relative obscurity.

But if you’re keen on character-driven narrative, and imperfect heroes whom you nevertheless come to care about, give this a try. Even if you have no interest in Captain America in general, (and I don’t…), I’m pretty certain that this version will win you over.