#ed brubaker

[burningfudge]

happy twentieth anniversary to one of the greatest identity reveals in comic book history

captain america (2005) #8

published july 20, 2005

[mrs-stans]

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER [MARVEL PREMIER COLLECTION] by Ed Brubaker Features an exclusive foreword by Academy Award-Nominated actor Sebastian Stan

[theforswornelite]

[comiced]

Daredevil: Born Again 2x08 - The Southern Cross (2026)

Daredevil Vol. 2 #83 (2006)

Ed Brubaker | Michael Lark

[magnetothemagnificent]

Reading (or in my case, rereading for the umpteenth time) the Winter Soldier storyline can be so frustrating because Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting went out of their way to show that Bucky was a kind, caring, and compassionate young man. In one of the first instances we see him in a flashback he's helping a wounded man walk (Captain America Vol. 5 #1).

He's has a pretty strong moral compass and he gets really upset upon seeing a fellow soldier shoot a prisoner (Captain America Vol. 5 #5).

To the point where it's Steve Rogers who is the one to tell Bucky to calm down. Captain America, who is supposed to be the paragon of virtue, is the one to tell Bucky to relax. And then later it's Bucky who reminds Steve about the civilians and that they had to focus more on saving the civilians than going after the Red Skull.

And this whole storyline preceeds the next issue, where the Winter Soldier sets off a bomb in Philadelphia, which killed thousands of civilians, to really hammer home that the Winter Soldier is everything Bucky Barnes never was. Steve literally says so a few issues later when he's grappling with the revelation (Captain America Vol. 5 #9).

The whole Winter Soldier saga hammers home again and again that Bucky Barnes was a good person, a caring person, someone who would hold a dying man's hand on the battlefield (Captain America Vol. 5 #11).

And even as the Winter Soldier he kept trying to turn against his handlers again and again, he kept trying push back and escape (Captain America Vol. 1 #12).

He's someone who despises tortures and human experimentation (which might be why he mysteriously saved Captain America earlier from the AIM robots leading the infamous "why the Hell is Bucky?" confrontation).

And then when it's all over, when Steve gives him his memories back with his Cosmic Cube, when Bucky remembers everything he was forced to do as the Winter Soldier, he's so horrified he wishes he were dead (Captain America Vol. 5 #14).

Bucky Barnes was a good person, a good man, and the tragedy of the Winter Soldier is how such a good person was made to do such terrible things.

Which is why I get so so annoyed and frustrated when people allege that the Winter Soldier saga portrayed WWII-era Bucky as more ruthless and violent (I'm sorry did we read the same Golden Age comics? Golden Age Bucky is 1000 times more violent than any other version of him) than his counterparts in earlier portrayals, or that the MCU version of Bucky was somehow softer and kinder and more of a tragic figure. If anything, I'd say that this version of Bucky in Captain America Vol. 5 is a better glimpse into Bucky's humanity than anything prior, which truly shows the way Bucky interacted with civilians and other people and the kindness and compassion he displayed, and exactly why what Karpov and Department X and Lukin did to him was so deeply twisted. And the saga also shows that at no point did Bucky have any agency as the Winter Soldier, that the Winter Soldier wasn't an expression of his 'true self' or anything.

[avengerscompound]

Bucky Barnes & Natasha Romanoff Captain America (2004) #34

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@dr-reids-fidget-toy#omg I didn’t know that about comic bucky that’s rlly cool

Starting a new post because I have off-topic Thoughts. Comic!Bucky contains fascinating commentary on the Cold War, WWII, and the media representations thereof. MCU!Bucky is (by necessity) pretty watered down. In the Brubaker comics, Bucky isn't brainwashed, at least not in the classic Marvel sense. He's just this guy who believes in the absolute rightness of his country, and has been in combat to support the U.S. since age ~14... and then he gets blown up by a missile, loses his memory, and Department X tells him "his country" is the USSR. So now he's the Winter Soldier. Nothing else about his personality or his politics changes. The Winter Soldier we see in the Brubaker comics is definitely a villain — he kills indiscriminately, kidnaps civilians to get his way, murders Rick Jones out of petty spite. But his personality is basically the same from childhood.

This is Steve remembering Bucky as a kid during WWII:

Brubaker retcons Bucky's role, from "kid sidekick who rushes in first and gets kidnapped, needing Captain America to rescue him," to "kid agent who infiltrates bases first, so that Captain America can follow him." With the memory loss, Bucky goes from slitting throats and setting off bombs for Uncle Sam, to doing it for Mother Russia. He's always been as cold and as willing to kill witnesses as he is as the Winter Soldier. It just never made the news reals.

And that's the other half of his retconned role: being propaganda for other child soldiers (e.g. Toro) who join up in his wake. This is Bucky and Steve watching a Cap and Bucky recruitment newsreel:

As an adult, the real difference isn't that Bucky is Soviet now; it's that he doesn't have Steve holding his leash anymore. To be clear, comic Winter Soldier also isn't free to come and go as he pleases — he's kept in a freezer between missions, he's probably not paid, he's in Department X — but he also has far more agency within the latitude of his orders. He's not dead-eyed and tortured by guilt like we see in the MCU. He goes on side quests to kill other Buckies. He argues constantly with Aleksander Lukin (the comic equivalent of Pierce). He complains about the inconvenience of not just sniping Steve in the head to steal the Tesseract.

Brubaker's point, throughout the comic, is that we have been lied to about World War II being "noble" or "good" or the story of the U.S. saving the day. And that that lie is used to prop up everything from U2 spy planes built with 100x the budget for education, to the Patriot Act nullifying the Fourth Amendment. Because not only is "WWII was a noble war fought without atrocities" nationalistic bullshit, but "Soviets are fundamentally different from us" is too. Bucky's continuity of character reveals both at once. He's a walking Soviet superweapon. Why? Because he was a walking American superweapon first, starting before he was old enough to shave.

Anyway, I get why the MCU had to change his backstory. You have to a) remind the audience who Bucky is, b) show-don't-tell why Steve is sad Bucky is trying to kill him, c) get across the idea that Bucky doesn't want to kill Steve but feels he has to, d) use Bucky to develop Steve's character, and e) set up a way for Bucky to get un-brainwashed. All within the span of ~30 minutes this movie has for this plot, amidst all the other plots. MCU!Bucky plaintively asking Pierce who Steve was, only to get slapped in the face, is sort of like AniTV!Tom constantly pawing at his ear: it quickly gets across that this character isn't acting under his own volition, in a way that minimizes audience confusion.

Plus: it's a Hollywood movie. It wouldn't get funded if it was too critical of the U.S. military. Movies are always, by definition, more conservative than other media because of their need for funding. And the MCU makes a decent effort to incorporate at least some criticism of the U.S., having Zola be involved in Operation Paperclip and having him (while working for the U.S.) order Howard Stark's murder. But a computer ghost reciting dry facts about the CIA recruiting Nazis doesn't have the same gut punch as watching the "good guys" send the literal child to knife his fellow child soldiers during WWII would have had.

[kapelukh]

the legends of meet cute trope🥰