Captain America #600
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Butch Guice and others
Marvel Comics
Price: $4.99
Released date: June 15, 2009

The big news in the comics world was Marvel’s announcement of the imminent return of the original Captain America, Steve Rogers. Now if you’ve been reading comics for any amount of time, you probably know that death is only a temporary issue for any of the major characters, and that eventually ALL dead characters will be coming back, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that Steve would be coming back.

I had hoped that Marvel Comics would leave him alone for a while, mostly because the current Captain America series following Steve’s old sidekick Bucky Barnes as Cap has been amazing. The twenty-five issues since Steve Rogers’ “death” have been easily the best book being produced today by anyone. The series has been consistently smart, action-packed, and straight-up entertaining, and it’s all due to the writing of Ed Brubaker, who managed to bring back Bucky and make it not only believable, but compelling. Now that we’ve seen the start of the return of Steve Rogers, it will be interesting to see if Brubaker can maintain the high level of quality that he has brought to this title.

As for the actual story of Captain America #600, well to be honest it’s pretty much like any other issue of the series, just with a few more pages. The plot is told as a series of vignettes built around everyone remembering Steve a year after his death. Brubaker takes us through all the main characters and villains of the series, and also introduces what could be a new main character for the book.

The characters we see are Sharon Carter (Steve’s girlfriend and supposed killer), Bucky, the Red Skull, Crossbones and Sin, the Falcon, the 1950’s Captain America, and the Heroes Reborn teenage Bucky (continuity warning: In the 90’s when Rob Liefeld took over Captain America, his series had Cap partnered with a teenage girl Bucky. Recently in a series written by Jeph Loeb with art by Liefeld, the teenage Bucky was brought into the regular Marvel Universe.) We’ve seen this structure before in issues of Cap, particularly since Steve’s death. For a book called Captain America, the title character often takes a back seat to the supporting cast. The set-up works great and we get some great scenes, especially the ones with the Red Skull and Crossbones, who I might be more excited to come back to the book than Steve Rogers. Of course, the big part of the issue is the set-up for Steve Rogers’ return, which quite frankly, turns out to be a very small part of the issue. This is really an issue, just as the last twenty-five issues have been, about the legacy of Steve Rogers, and that while other people have tried to fill his shoes, he is the one and only Captain America.

As an anniversary issue, this ends up being an odd issue. It’s not a great jumping-on point because it relies on having read the series up to this point, and it’s largely a set up for the next part of the story that Brubaker has been telling since taking over. Of course, that’s a good thing for me and the other readers of the series, as I can’t wait to see what happens, and I also can’t wait to see Bryan Hitch’s art on the upcoming Captain America: Rebirth series that this is a prologue for. Also, it’s weird to see how much secrecy Marvel put into the issue, and then read it to see that not much happens that we couldn’t guess was going to happen. In the end, this is just another great issue of an already great series, so if you haven’t been reading it, you really need to be. This issue gets a five out of five from me, and if I could give it more, I would.