Digitally Speaking...23 "Captains America and Marvel, Avengers Forever"

Captain America and the Falcon #1 (Marvel)
From 2004.

Given recent developments, it's always interesting to look back at the history of Falcon's association with Captain America (in case you don't know, aside from Falcon's screen debut in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he is Captain America now, in the pages of All-New Captain America).  This is certainly a curious entry in that history, a series that lasted a little over a dozen issues.  The writer is Christopher Priest, perennially underrated, working with Bart Sears.  The pair seem to have somehow evoked the later Jason Aaron series Scalped, both in general approach and even art (Sears is distinctive enough in style, but here looks a lot like R.M Guera's work).  It's pre-Ed Brubaker, but is generally comparable in approach.  It's an exercise in making Cap socially relevant by entangling him in Guantanamo Bay (although that's because he's trying to figure out what Falcon is up to).  The copyright information in the digital edition listed the release date as 2013, which is less than accurate.

Captain America: The First Avenger - First Vengeance #1 (Marvel)
From 2011.

This prequel to the movie opens with action scenes of Cap at war with his scrawny origins as his mother offers encouragement and he meets Bucky for the first time.  I'm not sure how much overlap there is, because it's been a while since I've seen the movie, which I otherwise have fond memories of, considering it from the start to be one of the better entries in the Avengers cycle to date.  Writer Fred Van Lente tends to bounce around a lot, being, I guess, generally adaptable, which here he takes pretty literally.

Captain Marvel #1 (Marvel)
From 2014.

This is a reboot of a previous Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel series.  For those of you (like me) who know very little about this particular version of Captain Marvel, other than the fact that Danvers used to be a previous Ms. Marvel (as distinguished from the current one, making a spectacular splash and a personal current favorite of mine in the G. Willow Wilson series that launched at the same time as this), you won't receive too much clarification here.  Marvel can be notoriously impenetrable in terms of continuity, when it isn't doing soft reboots (which is often) that nonetheless imply connections to what came before.  Thankfully it's not too hard to follow along.  If you liked Guardians of the Galaxy, you'll be pleasantly surprised that the thrust of the issue is getting her into a general Star-Lord direction.  I had no idea.  All I knew was, the series relaunched, and she's there on the cover readjusting her glove (and I still have no idea why they went in that artistic direction, though it looks distinctive enough, and maybe that was all they cared about).  Apparently she's had a relationship with Jim Rhodes, although at this point relationships have probably happened between all of Marvel's characters (it's a real soap opera landscape in that regard; the new Storm series has explored a relationship with Currently Dead Wolverine that I hadn't known about previously, because last I knew Ororo's only notable relationship had been with Black Panther, because, uh, they're both African).  But the question remains, why does this series even exist if there doesn't seem to be much of a Carol Danvers narrative to exploit, much less in a relaunch that purposefully thrusts her in a new direction?

Avengers Forever #1 (Marvel)
From 2001.

Speaking of Marvel's soft reboots...This may have been the last hurrah of the pre-Bendis/Ultimate Comics era, what might be considered the culmination of Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers itself, a series that had considerable acclaim at the time, a return to form for a company that had suffered a great deal thanks to bankruptcy, the Spider-Man Clone Saga, the Heroes Reborn era, and the Image exodus in general, not to mention a whole X-Men era that failed to leave any meaningful legacy to that franchise.  But all good things must come to an end.  Avengers Forever itself has, so far as I know, no comparably lofty reputation.  Maybe it does.  My knowledge of Marvel lore goes only so far.  It's a story that attempts to take an expansive look at the legacy of the team, pivoting around Rick Jones (kind of hard to explain him these days, of which DC fans can say the same concerning Snapper Carr), even having a look at what probably turns out to be a possible future in which humanity has borrowed the idea of the Avengers to become galactic tyrants.  All of which is to say, Avengers Forever is now a curiosity at best.