My Two Cents

Actually, it'll probably be more like a penny for my thoughts since I don't really think too much about the new Cap, the prospect of who is the new Cap, or when exactly this Cap will disappear to make room for Steve Rogers to return as an LMD, a Marvel Zombie or to wake up from his grisly Civil War dream.

I like Ed Brubaker's stuff a lot. I've even started reading his run on Cap this week out of curiosity (once again, I heard an interview with the guy and I'm probably gonna check out Criminal, too) but this whole brouhaha over the death of Cap...meh. He's been dead before.

To be honest, I might actually be a bit more interested if Alex Ross wasn't involved with the redesign. If my humble opinion means anything, Ross is possibly one of the most overrated artists in the industry getting a lot of attention for peaking early with a couple of dynamic, high-profile projects, and then never really doing anything quite as interesting ever again. Sure, Marvels was great, and I still hold his U.S. project with the always entertaining Steve Darnall as one of the best Vertigo minis ever, but when was the last time Ross showed us something different? This costume redesign is a perfect example of that. I mean, I'm looking at this Cap costume and it seems strikingly similar to the Spider-Man concept sketches from back in 2001.

I nabbed this image from Ross' site where you can see more examples of the design he came up with for Sony Pictures and the first Spidey film. It's hard for me to look at the two and see many conceptual differences. Sure, the new Cap has boots and gloves to riff off of the original costume but I'm sure if Spidey wore boots and gloves there'd be a similar sort of motif running in these film designs.

I'll probably post again on the subject if I manage to read up to and through the Death of Captain America storyline. I don't doubt there's some good work being done on the title, so we'll see how things pan out.

Onwards and upwards!

mike