Death of Captain America

Okay the death of Captain America (issue #25) was released on 3/7/07 and we have yet to see issue #26, but Marvel has manged to release two worthless issues of their five part mini-series Fallen Son. The utter crap that the Fallen Son mini-series is to me is destroying whatever good story Ed Brubaker may have started in Captain America. Plus I just do not believe that Marvel has killed off Captain America. We have seen way too many deus ex machina type scenarios for me to buy off on this story. Plus I was willing to give Marvel a pass on the whole over hyping as they seemed to play this under the radar. Now we have this elaborate bullsh*t mini-series that is significant of nothing and a director's cut of Captain America #25 to try and play off of this "event".

This is wrong on many levels. First if they know they are bringing him back, then the entire crap is a money grab and totally disingenuous. Even if they are leaving him dead for a year, haven't they killed the casual customer who might have been drawn into the story by having issue #26 come out so long after #25? If it shows up this Wednesday that is a two month lag for a book that has never had lateness issues before. It smells bad.

The whole thing is a shame as I think Brubaker has done his best super hero work on Captain America and manged to dance around Civil War while his character was screwed around with the most in that series. Now when he had to deal with the repercussions of Civil War on Cap, he kills him off. If dead he now never has to deal with those issues, but Brubaker has been on this book for awhile and this is just an arc in the comic, with the death being an element of the plot. If you read the whole run (which I have, but not recently) he has been laying out a long form story of the ultimate battle between Captain America and the Red Skull. This story does not read like one that was leading up to Captain America dying.

I contend if Captain America was really dead the supposed repercussions would have been played out in his book and not this Fallen Son money grab from Marvel. Also if he was really dead we might actually have something happening in the Fallen Son mini-series.

Ultimately it might be a good story and enjoyable, but in the short term it has come across as a total money hungry rip off job from Marvel. Which is a shame as Ed Brubaker may have just wanted to tell this story and the marketing people ran away with it.