Captain America #19
Recap
THE LEGEND OF STEVE Concludes!
Cap comes face-to-face with the Dryad and learns her game-changing true identity!
Review
This issue features the origin story for the Daughters of Liberty, taking it back to revolutionary-era and pushing through to the revelation that Peggy Carter has been a Daughter of Liberty all along. A perhaps more stunning revelation is that Alexa Lukin had also been a Daughter of Liberty up until the end of the Cold War. The threads that could be pulled from this tapestry will undoubtedly make for a number of interesting stories in the future but in the present the series seems to have lost some of the focus it previously carried.
The artwork for this issue was a drastic improvement over the previous issue, with Masters getting an assist from Bob Quinn. Removing the feeling that the artwork was a rush job was good for the issue but the narrative still feels like it has been accelerated and is veering slightly out of control. Perhaps nearly two years is long enough without a true “Captain America” but this series is the only place in the Marvel Universe where Captain America was sidelined making the gesture ring somewhat hollow. That failure is not on Coates but on the editorial side of the house. Coates is undoubtedly a fantastic writer and clearly has something in the works for the highly hyped Captain America #25 (it certainly feels like a setup for a female Cap, does it not?) but if the story doesn’t do more to entice readers to stay by casting off the heavy reliance on the unexplainable and various Macguffins, there may not be many fans left by the time we get there.
Final Thoughts
Captain America #19 (Coates, Masters, Quinn, Milla, Petit) provides intriguing background on the Daughters of Liberty but still the underlying themes of the run seem to be eroding with time.
Captain America #19: These Daughters of Liberty
- Writing - 8/108/10
- Storyline - 7.5/107.5/10
- Art - 7.5/107.5/10
- Color - 9/109/10
- Cover Art - 9/109/10