Rick Remender and John Romita Jr. bring the first arc to its emotional climax in a grand and old school fashion that long-time comic fans should appreciate.
Written by Rick Remender
Illustrated by John Romita Jr.With the only way back to Earth slowly closing forever, Captain America must make the hardest decision of his life.A new ally from the past arrives, and makes everything worse.Zola’s plot is hatched, humanity in the crosshairs.The final days Dimension Z are here, and if Steve Rogers escapes intact, he will never be the same again.
By his own account, Remender set out to craft a Kirby-esque “Captain America” story. The kind of story where anything could (and probably would) happen to the titular hero. Remender plucked Captain America, a man already out of time, out of the time he’s grown accustomed to and into the indescribable techno-terrorscape of “Dimension Z.” Putting him in Arnim Zola’s world gave him, but more importantly John Romita Jr., license to throw a wide assortment of brand new threats at him.
Somewhere along the way, Cap picked up a son, Ian – a eugenics experiment raised to be one of Arnim Zola’s children. Unexpectedly, Remender and Romita used this as an opportunity to pull at our heartstrings. As solid as their Kirby pastiche was, the latter issues of “Captain America” highlighted what are easily the strengths of these two creators – their abilities to make gut-wrenching story choices and depict them effectively. Each issue raised the stakes, and the coupling of issues #8 & #9 took those ideas to their apex. Almost any description of the content would be a spoiler, so it will suffice to say that Captain America is torn between the world he built for himself in Dimension Z and the world that he knew before he got there. But nothing is as it seems, he can’t trust his own mind, and he will probably be wrecked by that fact for a good while.
Having recently caught back up with Romita’s 90’s-00’s work on “Amazing Spider-Man”, I can see a clear difference between what he was doing a decade or so ago and the style that he’s working with now. As a sequential storyteller, Romita is still at the top of his game. He pulls back on the emotional moments to give them the proper space to breathe. As Cap dusts off his artistic talents in a flashback to spend a little quality quiet time with Ian, Romita breaks your heart, given what we know has happened with the pairing over the course of this arc. Cap’s painting, combined with the idealistic musings that Remender applies to the scene contrasts beautifully with the rest of the issue. The art contrasts this moment of beauty with the crumbling world around our heroes, where all hope is lost. There’s just a fleeting light coming through the darkness.
On the other hand, Romita’s decision to move toward a more expressionistic, minimalist style has not gone over entirely flawlessly. While others who use a style that approximates reality rather than tries to mimic it tend to aim for a cleaner line, Romita opts for a sketchier approach. Again, his sequencing and structure is tremendous, but the actual execution is sometimes muddier than it feels like it should be, thanks to his overuse of crosshatching and line-shading. At the end of the day, this is still tremendous work from a modern master with a long, respectable tenure. His style also applies to this exact type of Captain America story incredibly well, allowing him to stretch his design muscles and to break Cap down rather than build him up as an icon.
Remender’s long opening storyline on the title has been characterized by a rough, but strong emotional arc with an immense potential for fallout and weirdness in all the good ways. Remender and Romita bring out the emotional depths that are not seen as often in interpretations of the character. Romita was certainly an excellent choice for the opener, but given where Cap looks to go from here, it may also have been the right choice to go in a very different visual direction for the next arc. This was not one to miss, though – even if it got a little messy along the way.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy.
