Trades for 1/20/13: I can't feel my arms

At chezkevin: we read comics so you don't have to! Today I'm continuing my romp into Brubaker's Captain America-verse, as well as diving into a Wolverine paperback. Kids these days like that guy right?

Captain America: The Man with No Face
by Ed Brubaker, Luke Ross and Butch Guice
collecting issues 43-38

The paperback's broke up into two separate stories, "The Man with No Face" by Luke Ross and "Old Friends and Enemies" by Butch Guice. Both of them bring up stories from Buck's past as the Winter Soldier. Memory is a huge theme in the title, and it's Bucky's memory that compels him to right the wrongs he committed as the Winter Soldier. In fact, it's the biggest motivator in these stories: Bucky acts the way he acts to honor Steve Rogers' memory and, in "Old Friends and Enemies," to honor Toro's legacy. Memory makes us who we are, and Bucky uses that to shape his role as Captain America.

I'm pretty surprised at how much I liked Luke Ross' pencils. It's pretty straightforward superhero/noir stuff, and then he has these bombastic action shots, of the Black Widow jumping off a motorcycle or Batroc the Leaper (Batroc the Leaper) kicking Captain America in the face.

As far as Brubaker stories go, these are amazingly self-contained. They start in the first issue and end in the third. Then an all new one starts, unrelated. Considering his 42-issue mega-arc, I was expecting the start of another, -- but I liked the stories all the same. Ho-hum, we'll see what next paperback has to offer.


Wolverine: Origins - Savior
by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon
collecting Wolverine: Origins #'s 6-10

Back in the day, Origins had some amazing variant covers. I mean amazing. I remember one time I got issue 9 from a bargain bin, based solely on the variant by Texeira.

So when I found this in the library, I figured I'd give it a shot. It's a solid Wolverine/espionage/flashback story, but passable for anyone who doesn't care too much about Marvel's favorite Canadian. It's no Enemy of the State, and it left me feeling indifferent.

That said, there's this one page that I found very odd. It's the strangest piece of visual storytelling I've seen in a while:

When you get speared in the chest by a Carbonadium tentacle, is that the first thing you say? Is that how you react -- by saying, "I. . I can't feel my arms."? The only way it works is if we have that close-up in the fourth panel, and then the "shock" fifth panel, but even then it rings false. That guy should be grunting in pain, not looking melancholily at the hole in his chest and saying he feels numb.

Steve Dillon has some really great pages in here. This was not one of them.

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