Hi! Hope you are well. I wanted to ask about Cap comics mainly Steve Rogers. My son wants to read Cap comics but we don’t know where to start. He doesn’t want to read Spencer’s run. Any suggestions?
My starter rec for pretty much everyone is the miniseries Captain America: Man Out of Time. It’s a modern version of Steve’s origin story that shows him being found by the Avengers and getting used to the present. So that way you’ll get an idea of who Steve is and where he came from while still reading modern comics. (I mean, I like the original comics too. But they can be very problematic at times and they’re kind of an acquired taste.)
Other than that, it depends what you like, really. Mark Waid, who wrote Man Out of Time, also had two (two-ish? three?) runs on Captain America, and honestly the way he writes Cap is my favorite and basically the way I see Steve; he gives Steve an earnestness that could be corny but isn’t, and I feel like he does a really good job conveying what’s so inspiring about Steve. Like, you see why people want to follow this guy. Waid’s first Cap run was in the mid-late 90s, at the tail end of volume 1, #444-454, and you can read it currently in print in the Epic Collection called Man Without A Country. He continued to write Cap for the first 23 issues of volume 3; I own it in omnibus (which includes the vol 1 issues and an additional miniseries called Sentinel of Liberty) but the individual arcs are (or at least were) available in trade as To Serve And Protect, American Nightmare, Red Glare, and Land of the Free.
If you enjoy Waid’s writing but like him better with more modern art, he had a very short recent run (technically vol 1 as this was when everything renumbered very briefly). It’s the run right after Spencer’s but I promise you can read it without reading (or liking) Secret Empire. It’s collected in two trades, Home of the Brave and Promised Land, though I’d only recommend the first one because Promised Land... doesn’t really have Steve in it. The first one (which is the Waid/Samnee run) does have Cap #700, which is probably my most favorite recent Cap issue that I’ve read in... I dunno, years? It’s good. So, yeah, definitely check out Home of the Brave.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ current Cap run (vol 9) is also a very solid and interesting read, with a lot of big and heavy themes, but it has some pacing issues and if you’re specifically looking to avoid any hints of Secret Empire you probably want to avoid it because it’s very much about what people think of Steve (and what Steve thinks of himself) in the wake of Secret Empire. It is, however, probably my second favorite current comic I’m reading, so there’s that. (The first is Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.)
Coates’ run is pretty clearly influenced by Ed Brubaker’s Cap run (vol 5), which I know a lot of people rate as their favorite Cap run, but Brubaker’s Steve is a little too grim and joyless for me. Also, uh, Steve dies in #25 and after that it’s all BuckyCap, so if you’re looking for a run where Steve is Captain America it mostly isn’t this one. But a lot of people really love it!
There are also a lot of classic Cap stories and runs that are worth reading! I think if I had to recommend just one arc to start with I’d probably pick the Stern/Byrne run from the early 80s (#247-255), collected in an old trade called War & Remembrance, currently in an Epic Collection called Dawn’s Early Light. This is from the era when Steve has just moved to Brooklyn Heights and is starting to be a commercial artist (although not a comic book artist; that’s slightly later). It features the first appearance of Bernie Rosenthal! It has one of my favorite Batroc the Leaper stories. And it has #250, where people want Steve to run for president and Steve’s response is... well, it’s very Captain America.
I hope that gives you somewhere to start!
