Sunday, June 23, 2013

Winter Soldier #19 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

I really, really wanted to like this issue.  After spending most (if not all) of this arc totally lost, I was hoping that Latour would manage to pull a rabbit from his hat and arrange the pieces of this difficult puzzle so that they formed a clear image.  Unfortunately, the puzzle is still unassembled and we have no time left to finish it.

I get the Electric Ghost's desire to change her past, but the most confusing part of this issue is that she seems to simply repeating events that we've already seen, this time simply inhabiting the bodies of certain participants in those events.  If I'm mistaken and Tesla was actually changing the past, Latour never really clarifies her motivations or the consequences of her actions.  After all, if she planned on changing the past, why insist on using Hammer's body to assassinate her father?  Why not use it to ensure that Bucky doesn't kill him?  Why not go further than just preventing specific events and make sure that she and her father live happy lives in the United States?  Moreover, Latour never makes it clear why Tesla chooses the moments that she does, making this issue seem like a distorted, random series of moments.  To make matters worse, this series of moments simply comes to an abrupt end for no clear reason.  Does Bucky actually convince Tesla to stop?  Or, does the Tesseract simply stop working?  Latour again doesn't really tell us.  Finally, after the dust settles, we never learn the consequences if she did change the past.  As "Age of Ultron" shows us, killing one person in the past can have profound effects on the present, so Tesla's spree here should make something look different.  But, we never see that.  The entire world could be different, nothing could be different:  all we know is that a one-armed Bucky is just sitting on a beach drinking a beer.

My hope, at this point, is that Marvel will be using Bucky in the future, given that he'll play a key role in the upcoming sequel to the "Captain America" movie.  But, I just hope that Latour is not the person to tell that story.  As Kieron Gillen has shown in taking over the reins of "Young Avengers" from Allan Heinberg, it is possible to transition someone else's character to a new writer in a way that honors who they were but makes them even better.  We unfortunately did not see that here.  Latour seemed to understand Bucky, but the story that he told did little to tease out new aspects of his character for me, since I spent too much time just trying to figure out what the story itself was.  Bucky deserves better and hopefully he'll get it.

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