Rick Remender and John Romita Jr. throw ‘CAPTAIN AMERICA’ into the depression.
Rick Remender and John Romita Jr. have the less than enviable task of following up Ed Brubaker’s stellar run on Captain America for Marvel Now! Brubaker brought a decade of pure rock, dropping outstanding storylines and doing the unthinkable. He brought Bucky back and it was awesome. How do the two considerable talents follow up on such a run? By going in a different direction.
Comics Alliance:
Talking to iFanboy about the new Captain America series, Remender said that it was “obviously an honor” and “terrifying” to take on the creative reins of Cap after Ed Brubaker’s near-decade run with the character. Describing the task as “a hell of a challenge,” he explained the approach he was planning to take:
In the tone of the thing, I decided to try and draw from the [Jack] Kirby era of Cap where characters like Arnim Zola were created in the mad bomb stuff. All of these giant huge ideas, and a bit of sci-fi leaning as I am wont to do, that seemed perfect to me. To sort of emulate, as much as I could in my own voice, that era of Cap. So that’s sort of where we’re going. Seeing Johnny [Romita Jr.] do that stuff, there’s nobody who could do Kirby and still be himself like Johnny. It turns into this, it’s like Man Without Fear mixed with all of the mad bomb Zola Kirby stuff.
As well as shifting away from the more-grounded feeling that the character has enjoyed in recent years, Remender will be breaking with another Brubaker (and Cap!) tradition that may surprise a lot of people:
One of the mandates I have to myself is, I don’t want to touch the World War II stuff. I think that that has been done, now, and it’s been done perfectly. To go back and to keep focusing on Cap in World War II at this point, again, would be following too closely to what Ed has already done. What I’m doing is spending a lot of time in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 20s and 30s, showing Steve grow up [including] a lot of flashbacks to a young Steve Rogers growing up in Depression-era Lower East Side, and getting to know his family and his friends, and how this 98-pound weakling became such a tenacious, strong person; focus on the fiber and the integrity of who he is, and really develop that for the first time.
I’m not a huge fan of Romita Jr., but I have to respect the guy. It’s a style disagreement. However, I willing to give him a shot when he is paired with Remender. What say you folks?
