PrettyFakes

OK, I know it’s a comics blogosphere cliche to point at something awesome and bizarre in a superhero comic—let’s say it’s an all-out space battle between Gorilla Grodd and Monsieur Mallah, with the love of The Brain in the balance—and say “It’s like this was written just for me,” but seriously: an entire back-up story penned by Roger Stern spotlighting Cap’s 1980s girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal, recapping the highlights of the Stern/Byrne and DeMatteis/Zeck eras, and tying up the various loose ends associated with the supporting cast of that era? That is a micro-targeted back-up story if I’ve ever read one. The audience is me, plok, and . . . who else? I was startled but delighted to find it there.

Nostalgia for old stories is the cheapest high available in superhero comics (which I guess is why it’s so common), and I suppose in one sense it just highlights this dying wing of the industry’s reliance on aging fanboys like yours truly. Still, one of the reasons we read this stuff is for the way that decades-long accretions of complexities and convolutions make any single story bigger and more resonant that it would be on its own, and it was nice to see some light shined on an oft-neglected but rewarding corner of the Captain America mythos.

(I usually scrap any post in which I start to sound like Danny from The Rack, but doggone it: Bernie Rosenthal!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Comixx, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.