A Nail Forged In Iron
I've stated on numerous threads that I dislike captain Americas current series. It seemed to have gotten worse after the wonderful issue 6 and just rotted both in writing and Art. However, with the opening to a new arc, where captain america seems to be back in his old element( NOTE: I liked the Idea of traveling into another word, i just didn't like the execution), i was hoping that'd there would be room for improvements, and lucky, things got better.
I'm very glad that Romita is off the book, because he was way to much of a wild card. He has depended too much on his damn colorist which has lead him to terrible character designs and poor visuals in general. Carlos is a much better artist who happens to be way more consistent with his visuals. The great thing about it is that, it's really close to Romitas artwork, but it has a solid structure, therefore it doesn't seem like a splash of colors and pencil marks on a page. The action was amazing and i really hope that we get a good Cap Vs Nuke fight in this story arc. Though, one minor complaint (or confusion), during the conversation between Falcon and Steve, the text bubble is directed towards Falcon when cap is clearly the one who is speaking, which is a rookie mistake.
Now the story is actually a solid one, but my problem with it comes towards captain america himself. While there are positive aspects in this book( which i will discuss), the main issue here is that cap has Gained a major set back as a character. What do i mean by this? well when cap was found in the Ice long ago, and after that point, his whole mission was to stay strong and manage to adapt to a society of which he did not understand. He manages to do so, while maintaining his morals, and it was great. Now caps adventure in dimension Z basically puts him back in the same position, he has to adapt yet again to a new society. My Question is, Why? This is basically the same thing, but instead of his past life he misses Dimension Z. We've already seen something like this before, so why go with this again? I understand if he misses his son, but his "my friends Feel like strangers" speech rubbed me the wrong way, this was bad way to approach the story. People will argue that this was done for a specific idea, but we already know that cap is strong despite what situation he is in, and telling that again isn't bad, especially since this is supposed to be new reader friendly, but it should have been done in a unique way instead of a story that had been done before.
Lucky, this was the only problem this issue had. I'm glad that Rick decided to create a new Villain, one who believes that he is in fact a Hero. It's pretty interesting to see what he's ultimate plan is. We can see that he's already a "freedom" fighter type of villain. These types of villains always interest me as they actually believe that what they are doing is good, therefore trying to convince them of their mistakes only makes them angrier Plus, him hiring nuke is actually a good thing, because otherwise nuke would be just killing people at random, so it's better that there is actually a "brain" who uses the "brawn".
The self narrative from the perspective of other characters is actually pretty good as well, it provides a solid view of the situation as well as expressing the thoughts of the Narrator.
Suffice to say that i actually enjoyed this issue very much. There are some unanswered questions though, but i won't judge for now since the story still has tome to unravel.
