Review: Captain America (Operation Rebirth)

Blame it all on Mark Waid. He was the one who got me to actually like Captain America.

Now, mind you, I was a kid who grew up in the glorious 1980s and saw the episodes of the Cap cartoon on TV. I could even sing the theme song - "When Captain America throws his mighty shield..." But I never liked Cap when I was growing up. Well, Avengers was my favourite book but I was really in it for characters like Thor, Hercules and even the Wasp. Of course, it didn't hurt that John Buscema and Tom Palmer were the artists on the book when I was growing up. I did pick up some of the Gruenwald Cap issues but never felt any real attachments to them.

Then Mark Waid and Ron Garney got on the book in the mid-1990s. I heard everyone and their grandmothers talking about the book but I still did not pick it up. Then came the Rob Liefeld run and I actually picked up several issues of that! Finally, we had the return of Waid and Garney to the book and I followed that second run religiously all the way through. I even picked up the issue where Bob Harras got some stooge to rewrite Waid's script (on the Red Skull's origin) and effectively pissing off Waid so much that he left the book.

Anyway, one of biggest regrets was never having the chance to read the original Waid/Garney run from 1995-96. The two TPBs reprinting the run were more difficult to locate in these parts than the Holy Grail.

You can imagine by elation when I finally picked up the "Captain America: Operation Rebirth" TPB yesterday at 20% off cover price at my local comicshop.

It was about 10:30pm. I had a long day studying for my Criminal Law exams and teaching an English Lit. class. I just had my dinner and the only thing I looked forward to was a good night's rest. But I made the mistake of flipping through the copy of the Waid/Garney TPB that I just bought.

Big mistake.

I couldn't put it down until I finished the whole damned thing.

10 glorious issues - 2 story arcs with two single issues as prologue and epilogue to the whole thing.

Rarely does a "run" on a title feel so complete... so self-contained. This was Waid and Garney at the top of their game. Their second run after the "Heroes Reborn" thingy got me to like Cap. This original first run blew my love for the Star-Spangled Avenger into the stratosphere.

If you're getting tired of Ed Brubaker's super-serious espionage stuff and you're looking for portrayals of Captain America as the ultimate action hero, you'll find no better example than in this book. More than everything, Waid's and Garney's take on the book is a lot of fun. It was the Clinton Era and in a way, ol' Bill (pre-Kenneth Starr) was the real villain in the book! It wasn't a time for deeply introspective examination of the American identity. It was a time when people were rich and comfortable enough to simply kick off their shoes for some good, clean, action-packed fun.

So we get the Red Skull and Adolf Hitler in the first arc ("Operation Rebirth") and Machinesmith and Bill Clinton in the second arc ("Man Without A Country"). We get the cosmic cube in the first arc and all of America's nukes in the second arc. Impossible odds? Tell that to the man who simply won't give up unless he put the baddies to sleep and keep the world safe again - even at the price of his citizenship!

Another plus is the inclusion of Sharon Carter in the title (she was thought dead prior to this). In fact, it wouldn't be wrong to say that Waid was the one who brought Sharon back into the limelight again and allowed later writers such as Brubaker to continue fleshing out her character. Of course, that also led to manufacturers sculpting oversexed statues of the beloved S.H.I.E.L.D. agent such as the one below:

Finally, who can forget the one-liners? My favourite is the one from the final few pages where Cap tells Sharon to lead the fugitives to safety while he "holds off the army". And he does. Single-handedly. Cap is possibly the only non-powered hero to be able to say that with a straight face.

That was pre-911, pre-Afghanistan, pre-Iraq. Time was, kids my generation grew up with "Rambo" and "Commando" and "Independence Day". We were conditioned to believe that the army hasn't been assembled that America cannot confidently hold off. We believed that one strong man of ideals could turn the tide of an entire war - even holding off an army single-handedly. In fact, we even believed that American Presidents should be men-of-war and cheered Bill Pullman in "Independence Day" when he piloted the fighter jet to kill aliens. That was before Bush Jr. came along and made the American War President the stench of the world. That was before Obama came along and showed us that being President really means grappling with tiresome health policies and the economy all the time.

All in all, it was a fun time to live in. We could afford anything. We could even afford to be stupid. Even Rob Liefeld could afford to model for a jeans commercial one day and convince himself that he could be the artist to relaunch Captain America the next day. It was 1995.