Captain America #22 (Marvel)

writer: Rick Remender
artist: Carlos Pacheco

via Comic Book Movie

Hey, so you know the monkey in the room concerning classic Marvel comics and movie personality Captain America, that he's practically the poster child for steroids?  Someone finally wrote a story where his juice is taken away.

This leaves Steve Rogers as a shriveled old man, kind of what he'd be if he'd aged naturally from his original WWII existence.  Instead someone finally magically stripped him of whatever happened to have allowed him to originally escape such a fate.  And that's something DC fans saw twenty years ago in the pages of Zero Hour.

Anyway, so as part of the Marvel Even-More-Now initiative, as you might have read, the big three Avengers (Cap, Iron Man, Thor) will be going through a simultaneous identity crisis.  I'm not really clear on Iron Man's, but as far as Thor goes, apparently you can become the Norse god of thunder just because you can possess his power by lifting his hammer (I don't know, it sounded less stupid in my head explaining it that way, but anyway, they really stretched temporarily replacing him, one way or another).

I like Rick Remender's idea for Cap best.  I wish someone really would address his steroids more directly, but this is pretty good.  Sure, he'll get his steroids back (keep saying it and maybe it'll sink in), Falcon will go back to being Falcon, after being Cap for a while, but in the meantime there's an interesting wrinkle.

This is another instance of Remender writing Steve Rogers and/or Captain America more directly and relevantly than Ed Brubaker ever managed.  (The Winter Soldier thing was a great idea, but it's also a great gimmick, as in...gimmick.)

Having once randomly caught an issue and finding much to my surprise that I liked it, I was glad to give Remender's run a more deliberate look, and this was a good issue to sample.