Captain America: Road to War #1 Reviews 

Captain America: The Road to War #1

By | April 22nd, 2016
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

With the Captain America: Civil War just around the corner, Cap’s new team of Avengers prepare for their first battle. Read on below to see if it’ll have anything to do with the upcoming movie. It won’t.

Written by Will Corona Pilgrim
Illustrated by Andrea Di Vito

• CAPTAIN AMERICA and BLACK WIDOW must train the new Avengers recruits to work together as a team.
• Their first mission: stop the giant robot, ULTIMO!
• Featuring SCARLET WITCH, VISION, FALCON and WAR MACHINE!
• Bonus TALES OF SUSPENSE #58 included.

Nothing happened in this comic. I’m still going to try to be constructive and whatever, but nothing happened. I don’t know what I expected considering this is a tie-in to a movie and it’s not like a movie that millions of people are going to see will ask them all to read this one tie-in. That would be crazy. Imagine if Babe had a prequel comic where we saw Babe get taken from his mother and the movie started with everyone on their way to the sheep herding competition. There would be blood in the streets. What I’m getting at is, comic book prequels are usually pointless and “Captain America: The Road to War” doesn’t prove that idea wrong. Rather than focus on any of the events between movies that could lead to everyone going all Gettysburg on each other in Civil War, “Road to War” is just Captain America taking his new team of Avengers out for a test drive.

Speaking of that test drive, I was being a little disingenuous when I said nothing happens in this comic. HYDRA steals the Ultron scraps that were laying around whatever redacted country Age of Ultron took place in and built ULTIMO! They just straight up built a bigger Ultron robot. You’d think there’d be some stakes but there kind of isn’t. Captain America’s just like “We handled Ultron just fine last time, this should be a walk in the park.” You didn’t handle it fine last time though? The first ever superhero to actually die in a Marvel movie bit the dust when fighting Ultron and his sister is right there. Still, Cap’s right in that there’s no danger to this adventure since they’re still a month off from being in a movie. How great would it be if Elizabeth Olsen had some contract conflicts and couldn’t be in Civil War so Black Widow was just like “Yeah, Wanda got stomped by a huge Ultron last month, don’t worry about it.” I’m pretty sure that’s what happened with Ed Norton.

Outside of actual plot developments, nothing much happens with The Avengers themselves either. Black Widow and Cap spar while reminding themselves who everyone is (Falcon was in Winter Soldier! War Machine has guns!) right before heading off to fight Ultimo. The only real development in this segment is that Scarlet Witch can now kind of do telekinesis and also singlehandedly crush entire robots?! I hope there’s a scene in Civil War where she uses telekinesis to make someone straight up explode as a pay off to me and the four ten year-olds whose parents accidentally bought them the wrong Captain America comic.

You can’t have a war without a dance partner though, so how does Tony Stark factor into this comic? He kind of doesn’t. Cap is like “Yo, we’re going to go kill Ultron again!” and Tony, nonplussed by the resurrection of his greatest failure is like “I can’t do that I have to make my watch a hand cannon.” That’s the big final page reveal. Iron Man didn’t want to help out with Ultimo because he was building himself an Apple Watch that turns into an Iron Man glove. Oh shit. That’s going to be the tie-in to Civil War: Tony’s watch is going to morph into a hand cannon and he’ll blast someone. I really wanted my pay-off to be Wanda blowing someone up but I guess I’ll just lie down and take this.

Final Verdict: 3.4 – You’d be more prepared for Captain America: Civil War by declaring war on the North. Or, you know, watching the other MCU films.


James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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