imperiousrix's Winter Soldier: Winter Kills #1 review

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    A great one-shot for the holidays...

    Going over my old comic collections a month or so back, I stumbled across a multitude of my Civil War crossovers and one shots.  I really got into comics at the peak and conclusion of Marvel's Civil War, and as such a bulk of the comics up on my shelf are somehow related to the big event.  If I'm being honest, a lot of these are... kinda bad.  So much stuff was changing as a result of Civil War that, obviously, not everything worked as an interesting idea. 
     
    So it was with some apprehension that I opened up my dusty old copy of Winter Soldier: Winter Kills, a one-shot devoted to good old Bucky Barnes in his Winter Soldier persona.  Bucky has gone on to bigger things now, but I was always really intrigued by him as Winter Soldier; I loved his look, his back story, and just the character in general.  It was great to see him running solo in a book of his own and, to be honest, the story inside is still a great story that holds up today. 
     
    There are a lot of themes going on here and for the most part, Ed Brubaker does a great job juggling them all.  It's basically a story about Bucky trying to keep the past alive.  It's Christmas time, and normally someone would be spending this time with family and friends.  Seeing as the majority of Bucky's friends are dead, however, he instead spends this time remembering those he served with back in WWII.  Obviously, there is more going on in the book than that, and the book switches back and forth between artists as the time shifts from the 1940s to the present day.  The highlight is a run-in with the Young Avengers and their discovering his true identity in a genuinely touching bit of hero worship. 
     
    That's really what the book does best.  It does the interaction between human characters fantastically and, seeing as this is a Christmas story, there's a lot of sap for perhaps the average one-shot.  In fact, if there was one complaint about this it would be that, although there is certainly action in here, it's very underplayed in place of the emotional undertones.  If you don't like any of these characters, that means that there's not a lot to cling to, but the story is well-written and the artwork does a fantastic job of capturing both time periods. 
     
    If nothing else, though, this book captures the Christmas spirit in a moment in time and also the feeling of someone who has lost a lot in his life, but continues to soldier on.  I can see me pulling this out and flipping through it on a cold winter's day and having it bring a smile to my face.  If you love Christmas, if you've experienced loss, or you like Bucky Barnes (and who hasn't experienced at least ONE of those three), this is a fantastic one-shot and one that captures the Civil War, Winter Soldier, and human emotion perfectly.

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