In 2007, Ed Brubaker and artist Steve Epting made national news headlines when the character Captain America was assassinated within the pages of the critically and popularly successful Captain America series. The death of Marvel Comics’s flagship character quickly became a topic of debate between television news pundits and newspaper columnists, with cynicism over the trend of ‘killing’ characters as a marketing gimmick mixing with critical questions about what Cap’s death meant to American culture.
Overshadowed by the media attention was Brubaker and Epting’s series itself, which had skillfully managed to revitalize the title character in the 24 issues before Captain America was shot. As the fifth ‘re-launch’ of the ongoing series since the character’s creation in 1941,Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America struggled to find new, innovative ways to show a superhero with over a half-century of history and continuity.
Perhaps the most noteworthy change to the familiar Captain America narrative prior to the character’s death came when Brubaker and Epting reintroduced the character of James “Bucky” Barnes into the series. Bucky, who was originally Cap’s kid sidekick during the World War II Timely Comics Captain America Comics series, was most familiar to Marvel Comics readers as a corpse – the Marvel Captain America, after being ‘reborn’ in the 1960s, was continually plagued by guilt over the death of his former sidekick. Whereas most comics characters suffer ‘temporary deaths,’ and are quickly revived after news of their death has sufficiently boosted sales, Bucky Barnes was one of the few characters who ‘stayed dead.’
Yet, in bringing Bucky back to life, Brubaker and Epting also significantly changed the familiar Captain America narrative by literally re-writing the history of James “Bucky” Barnes. Flashbacks within Captain America reveal that Bucky Barnes was not just a kid sidekick, but a highly trained covert agent and government assassin who had been placed with the superhero by the U.S. government as a means of infiltration; the bright red, white, and blue colors of Captain America’s costuming and shield served as a distraction for the true weapon: Bucky Barnes.
This ‘rebirth’ of Bucky Barnes forces us to reconsider not only our conception of the sidekick in the comic book superhero narrative, but also the basic nature of the superhero. How does Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America series rewrite the history of other familiar heroes? With such a significant change to the character’s history, can we even consider this new Bucky to be a part of the pre-existing Captain America narrative continuity? How does this redefinition of the roles of Cap and Bucky affect America’s understanding of our own military?
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