What I think causes downward-trends in sales of books like Spectre, Aquaman, Iron Man, and here, Captain America, is that they are constantly being ended and restarted. To a collector (or at least one that doesn’t just go in for all of the #1’s hoping to make a buck) this is frustrating because they can never enjoy the satisfaction that comes from having 200, 300, 400, or more comics in a full-run. They are also deprived of reading their beloved hero or villain as written by different authors, and designed by different artists. Case in point, the last series of Cap ran only two plus years and featured only a handful of artists and writers. Some of the stories were excellent, and most had new or retold origins of Cap, anyway. One stint was even an elseworlds version of Cap. So why a new series?

I do enjoy this new go at Captain America. Written by Ed Brubaker, the story sets up a great mystery with plenty of surprises: the most notable being the death of Red Skull at the height of his scheming and the end of the first issue. That book had me hooked despite my misgivings about the necessity of starting a new volume. The art is darker than previous incarnations, and is well done by Steve Epting. There is also a really cool feature in that the flash-back black and white art is done by a completely different artist, Michael Lark. These two artists’ styles are similar, but it is a great concept to have different artists penciling different timeframes.

Overall, I am happy with this new series. I think that it would have been great to just add it onto the previous volume, but you can’t always get what you want, and that may include this being the volume of Cap that continues on into the upper 3-digits.

Lastly, let me say that Cap rocks. It is my personal goal to someday own all issues of “Batman,” and all issues of “Tales to Astonish” (and I am not talking about the 90’s version.) I would really appreciate a continuous run on Cap from here to infinity, but who knows? Question: Why Agent 13 instead of Black Widow? And, why does SHIELD need to send in their crews to check everything while Union Jack is on the scene? And, are Union Jack and Captain Britain the same person, or are they different characters? And, finally, why is nothing that I wrote funny this week? I guess it was just a week for genuine analysis.