New Comics!: The Captain America Edition (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Captain America #9:  Sharon Carter is a serious badass.  For reasons that I fail to understand, however, she's often dismissed as little more than Cap's girlfriend.  For example, I was confused why Sharon had to leave the Secret Avengers when Cap left.  Was she only a valid member so long as she was there alongside Steve Rogers?  Hadn't she proven that she could hold her own on the team?  She's often, even by Brubaker, reduced to the traditional female role of getting captured so that a concerned Captain America can come rescue her.  The cover of this issue even seems to imply that, with Sharon looking seriously threatened while surrounded by mocking images of the Machinesmith.  Thankfully, however, Brubaker lets Sharon be the badass we all know she is, showing not only her ability to go one-on-one with the entire Quincarrier arsenal, which Machinesmith had at his disposal, but also to devise a clever plan that traps Machinesmith into telling her what she needed to know.  I hope it's a sign that we're going to see more of this "agent in control" Sharon and less of the "damsel in distress" Sharon.

Interestingly, though, thinking about Sharon got me thinking about Cap and his current situation.  Unlike pretty much everyone else around her, Sharon doesn't have any special abilities or powers.  She's just a regular Virginia girl who happens to be a trained S.H.I.E.L.D. operative.  She doesn't have the Infinity Formula or the Super-Soldier Serum or any other formula coursing through her veins.  But, she's out there.  Conversely, Steve, when stripped of his Super-Soldier Serum, is reduced totally to the sidelines.  Brubaker is trapped in this regard by Simon's origin story for Cap, that he was a 98-pound weakling who volunteered to get the Super-Soldier Serum exactly because he was stuck on the sidelines.  It's a story particularly housed in the Second World War era, where any able man was assumed to be willing to go fight for his country.  As such, during that era, Simon was clearly forced to take the totally acceptable literary license and make Cap so weak that he couldn't fight in the War, which also conveniently made the change into who he becomes thanks to the Super-Soldier Serum all the more dramatic.  Today, though, it's a little awkward.  Beyond the fact that Cap basically got his powers from steroids, artists generally struggle, and fail, to keep him from looking like a Holocaust victim; Davis is no different here.  By making the dichotomy so great, though, we lose the opportunity to see Cap fighting without his Super-Soldier Serum.  As a 98-pound weakling, he looks like he can barely hold up his head, let alone try to do what Sharon accomplishes here.

It winds up being an interesting dichotomy on gender roles:  Cap had to be a 98-pound weakling in order to be forced onto the sidelines, and Sharon has to be as capable as she is to finally get off the sidelines.  Had Cap been, say, a 150-pound weakling, we might've been able to see him strap on a gun and say, "Screw the Secret-Soldier Serum, let's take down Bravo."  But, again, he instead had to be justifiably emasculated, to Holocaust-victim proportions, to prevent that from happening.  Even Brubaker can't write around it, because, to ret-con him to a 150-pound weakling, would leave open the question why he didn't get into the Second World War under normal circumstances.  It would essentially indirectly question his patriotism.

So, Cap is stuck on the sidelines and Sharon fights to get off them.  Cap is the man in distress and Sharon gets to save him.  It's like 60 years of gender relations in one issue.

Winter Soldier #3:  As usual with Brubaker, he manages to give us enough information to move along the plot but still keep us guessing.  Also, as usual, I had to re-read the first two issues of this arc to remember all the details.  I haven't been thrilled with Brubaker's work on "Captain America," but this series so far is the Brubaker I know and love.  Maybe he's just better writing Bucky than he is Steve.  Regardless, he's really telling an exciting spy story, exactly the type of story I hoped he'd tell in this series.  In particular, the introduction of the Doombot is genius.  Pretending to assassinate Doom so you can blow up the U.N. with a Doombot and make him claim credit since he's too egotistical to admit he lost control of it?  Genius.  Genius, on the part of Lucia Van Bardas, who Brubaker shows is a force with which to be reckoned, and genius on the part of Brubaker, for understanding Doom well enough to know it's exactly what he would do.  Moreover, Guice and Breitweiser combine to make the art amazing, a creepy blend of pencils, inks, and colors that vividly conveys the shadowy world in which Bucky and Natasha are operating.  I'm really loving this series so far.  I mean, how ballsy was it to start with Dr. Doom?  I can see a future where I'm not getting "Captain America," but I'm getting this series.