Ed Brubaker

Well damn.

Not really sure what I was expecting from this, to be honest. I've read Brubaker and Phillips excellent Criminal series. And something obviously caught my attention with this particular series, but my TBR pile tends to be about six months between purchase and reading, and I never read the back blurb before starting, so I actually couldn't remember a single thing about this series when I started it.

It's a simple concept, and it's been done in various forms before, but it's also an show more easy one to screw up. It has the excellent possibility of descending into unmitigated self-righteous cheese very quickly (I'm looking at you, Mark Millar).

Instead, Brubaker and Phillips take their time with the story, building up the characters and their relationships, then showing the fallout of their actions.

It's a fantastic story that's steeped in the hyper-reality of now, and it's all the better for it.

I gotta read more of this. This is excellent. show less

In one of his live albums, the great storyteller Jackson Browne jokes with his audience "I can sing you an upbeat song filled with sadness, or a sad song laced with hope."

This is a sad song laced with hope. Of small desperate men doing small desperate things against the monstrous power of hate and self-righteousness.

The story's choice to wrap that fight in the good and evil backdrop of the second World War makes a degree of sense. Take the classic tropes of pulp comics, the birth place of show more Captain America and so much our modern sense of the American way - turn that on its head with a reminder that the nazis has plenty of support here in America too. But then to wrap our hero in an older form of misplaced American masculinity, the Western frontier and the cowboy. It's a reminder how compressed American history is. But as a plot point, it means passing without comment whether our hero served in World War 1 and where he was throughout the roaring twenties. We find him destitute in 1939, but in a country struggling to recover from the Great Depression wasn't everyone?

The art dutifully tells the story. There are several pages of kinesthetic panels that were delights. But taken as a whole, while the story needs more time to develop, the art had run out of surprises. show less

A tremendous spy thriller with the wonderfully simple but alluring premise -- what if the Moneypenny-trope character was blamed for the murder of the James Bond-trope character? Only this Moneypenny turns out to have quite the past, and might just turn out to be more Bond than even Bond. Fast-paced, exciting, with great character moments and great use of the genre. My only slight complaint is that the end feels a tiny bit abrupt and by-the-numbers compared to the rest of the tale -- but it's show more still quite good. show less

I realllllllly want to rate this higher, but the ending pissed me off so much I'm docking a whole star. MOST of this story features a smart, savvy, empowered Natasha. Then she gets lobotomized with freaking ridiculous comic!book!science. If you're going to wipe someone's memories of one particular person? Don't explain it with SCIENCE. The neurochemistry of memory encoding does NOT work like that! At all!! God. Brubaker knows better than that & he can generally be relied on to provide show more plausible plot devices. I mean, if this had been MAGIC...or if they'd just left out the description of HOW SHIELD medical was gluing her memories back together. But no. Over-explaining ruined it.

They're doing another Natasha book soon, and I really hope they will let her be her kickass self without reducing her to the Avengers bike, omg. She could kill them all with her pinky & she has a rich and fascinating backstory with ALL THE VILLAINS YOU COULD ASK FOR. You'd think they could write her a decent action plot, right?

Maybe she & Logan can take a road trip and reminisce about the '40s. They could wreak some awesome havoc before some scary new villain showed up to make them get back to work. It'd do them both some good.

Oh, and, the ridic "New Levels Of PAIN!" catchphrase for Bucky's next arc? Christ. Bucky's been an angst-muffin since he woke up! It's what he does. Seeing him in new levels of pain doesn't really sell me on whatever's next, and the implication that he and Nat were so codependent that this will be worse than EVERY OTHER HORROR HE'S SURVIVED IN A REALLY HORRIFIC LIFE? Um. Right.

Apart from the story, the art in the last issue seemed kind of lazy. Rain is a trick for hiding under-drawn panels as much as it's a visual metaphor for angst and heartbreak. Worse, visually not a whole lot HAPPENS in this book. It's all brooding and rain with very little action or interaction. Disappointing. show less