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Spider-Man by Steve Epting

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The Silver Surfer by Steve Epting

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Storm 11x17

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winter soldier — cover art by steve epting & daniel acuna

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.