Thursday, February 28, 2013

Winter Soldier #15 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

OK, so I'm clearly going to have to give Latour some time, since, as the woman who opens this issue says, "Change is scary."  But, this issue was definitely a little rough around the edges.

First, I'm not sure if I'm thrilled with the change in focus.  I liked when Bucky was working with SHILED to wrap up loose ends from his Winter Soldier days.  I'm less thrilled with him engaging in some sort of "My Name is Earl" adventure where he tries to atone for his past.  It's a subtle difference, but Latour specifically makes it here.  In the former case, Bucky was killing bad guys that he knew existed from his Winter Soldier days.  Now, he's approaching people that he's wronged (like Leo, more or less) so that they don't come after him.  I sort of get that, but I'm not sure how realistic that is.  I mean, did he really think that the Croatian general was going to tearfully accept his apology for murdering his brothers and putting down his coup?

(Also, Latour probably should've spent some time on Wikipedia before writing this segment.  You really can't be fascist and communist.  They're on opposite sides of the spectrum.  Moreover, I'm pretty sure that the Soviets weren't occupying Croatia in 1977; Croatia was part of Yugoslavia then and I'm pretty sure that Tito had broken with the Soviets years earlier.)

But, the issue also suffers from some clunky smaller moments.  Latour portrays Nick Fury as incredibly grammatically challenged, uttering a whole lot of "don't"s and "ya"s in a short period of time.  Fury certainly speaks in contractions and colloquialisms, but Latour's attempt to convey his folksy charm (if you will) is distracting at times, making it difficult to understand what he's saying.  Moreover, even Klein (or possibly the letterer) has weird moments here, where Bucky's lenses have "Mapping..." emblazoned across them.  It's weird because either the lettering should be reversed (so that Bucky could read them) or Bucky for some reason wants his enemies to know what he's doing.  Plus, the Hydra brass knuckles?  Don't get me started.

So, I wasn't thrilled.  But, we'll see where it goes, I guess.  Color me worried.

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