Captain America #28: Q&A

The endgame for this acclaimed (although oddly seemingly overlooked) run from Coates is on as we creep towards the final issue, #30. All of threads established along the way are being carefully woven together into a masterful critique on social divisiveness in the United States at the moment. With this issue, the Red Skull takes center stage as a talking head that prey’s on the vulnerable and confused of a population, using a dictatorial approach to offer his own stregth and support to the weak. It is a strategy we see nearly every time we turn on a screen in our world and to see it play out in the pages of Cap has been chilling.

The emasculation of Captain America at the hands of Sin and the Skeleton Crew in this issue was a turn I didn’t predict (although I have long stood by the central premise here being is the precise character assassination of the icon of Captain America more than the man behind the shield). In “killing him softly” in the eyes of the American public, viral in all the worst ways, Coates primes the finale to either be a major change or a highly redemptive moment. However it plays out in the end, there is no question that this run will be one that is talked about by fans for decades to come as a major watershed moment for Captain America.

The series, sadly, continues to be plagued by inconsistent artwork that has come to be emblematic of Marvel as a whole. The ever-revolving door of artists almost certainly has to do with an unwillingness to sign artists to contracts, instead treating them as disposable commodities. In doing so, the cap on page rates is almost certainly affected thus perhaps impacting the buy-in from freelancing artists. I cite this possibility in order to say that I’ve seen Kirk’s art be more consistent during this same run, but here feels rushed and inconsistent from page to page. It still gets the job done and, of course, art is quite subjective, but nothing in this run has made me feel as if the artists were valued nearly as much as Coates, which leads to other problems we see in comics, both in the creation but also the journalism surrounding comics. Gone are the days of epic, long running writer/artist teams (at least in the mainstream) and seemingly in is the era of writer-privilege and art going to the least-busy available. But I digress.