Captain America: Steve Rogers #12 - Marvel Comics

CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS No. 12, April 2017

Shifting 32,567 copies in February 2017, at least according to “Diamond Comic Distributors”, it’s hard to imagine that many followers of Issue Twelve of “Captain America: Steve Rogers” weren’t enthralled by its cacophony of conflict and marvellously realised “Universal Newsreel” footage of Captain America “leading the charge against the [Third] Reich and their allies in the evil organization known as Hydra!” True, the vast majority of Nick Spencer’s writing is frustratingly as erratically penned as the inconsistent artwork of Javier Pina & Andres Guinaldo is poorly pencilled. But that still doesn’t stop the comic’s patriotic pulse from pounding when the titular character, fighting “alongside his best pal, Bucky”, confronts Nazi automatons and gas-masked goose-stepping troopers or, some seventy years later, “the creation of the Mad Thinker”.

In fact, the S.H.I.E.L.D. director’s ‘fist-fight’ with the Awesome Android inside the Museum of American History, is arguably worth this book’s cover price alone, as it genuinely seems to return to a far simply time when the Sentinel of Liberty just stood toe-to-toe with his opponent and outfought them using his fighting savvy and pugilistic smarts. Certainly the sequence, somewhat annoyingly dotted about throughout the twenty-one page periodical, contains all the elements needed for a sense-shattering ‘punch-up’; and one which Rogers only wins when he stops trying to trade like-for-like blows with the “artificial lifeform” and instead targets a natural weak-point of the robot's humanoid-shaped “almost indestructible body”; “Never fear, dear viewer -- We’ll always come out ahead in the end now that we have Captain America on our side!”

Far less impressive, and frankly followable, is Spencer’s sub-plot concerning the Taskmaster and Black Ant trying to sell Maria Hill the footage of the First Avenger whispering “Hail Hydra” to a captive Doctor Erik Selvig in Bagalia. Just why the former S.H.I.E.L.D. leader is conveniently skulking about the shadows of “the nation of super-criminals” is contrivingly explained by her “trying to find something -- anything -- that can get me back in the action.” Yet that doesn’t explain her willingness to agree Anthony Masters’ proposal to get “first refusal on every arms deal that comes across your desk” once the ex-Director has been reinstated, nor Elisa Sinclair’s revelation at being Madame Hydra?

Writer: Nick Spencer, Artists: Javier Pina & Andres Guinaldo, and Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg