So I decided to buy Vol 1 “Coward” one afternoon, just to see how I felt about it. I asked the owner about it, and he said the entire staff enjoys Brubaker and Phillips’ work enough to keep all of their titles in stock as much as possible. Bad Weekend (2019) Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips/Jacob PhillipsĪs I worked my way through the Brubaker Cap run as an adult, I discovered my store always had Brubuaker and Phillips’ Criminal on hand. That character meant a great deal to me and my holy grail in returning to comics collecting in 2020 was buying Brubaker’s full run on the Winter Soldier. For a long time, my fondest memory of reading Brubaker’s work was the original 14 issues of the Winter Soldier arc. I read most of his Marvel and DC books, and I knew he was famously partnered with Sean Phillips doing creator-owned crime comics, but I never went out of my way to read any of those stories. However, I never actually saw past Brubaker’s superhero work. Reading about the Winter Soldier hooked me on modern comics, and I’ve kept up with certain characters like Daredevil, Captain America, and Batman (all people Brubaker has written) ever since.

Thus, upon receiving the Captain America title, Brubaker requested to bring Bucky back as the Winter Soldier, and re-contextualized Cap’s experiences of his dead partner with an arguably greater tragedy. Bucky’s death at the hands of Baron Zemo was a retcon, and “Captain America (1968) #99” doesn’t actually exist. In reality, the Marvel revival of Captain America went from Tales of Suspense #59-99, with Captain America spinning off at #100. As he grew up searching for Captain America comics, his holy grail was “Captain America #99” which he assumed was the death of Bucky. Speaking to Kevin Smith on the Fat Man Beyond Podcast, Brubaker explained that both he and Bucky were military brats, allowing for a certain level of escapist self-insertion. The early parts of the Brubaker run were infused with a cold war spy thriller energy, and the desire to revive Bucky came from Brubaker’s own nostalgia. I was around 11 years old, and I followed the monthly adventures of Cap discovering his old sidekick, Bucky Barnes, was being controlled as the assassin, The Winter Soldier.

My first trip to a real comic book store, and my first ongoing series I kept up with was Captain America (2005) by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting and Mike Perkins.

I had copies of Batman: Ten Nights of the Beast, Superboy Annuals, Ghost Rider, etc. I’ve been reading comics my entire life, but the early years mostly consisted of me getting an assortment of old, random issues or trades with no sequence to them. 1 – Pulp-Noir Nostalgia Discovering Brubaker & Phillips

The ghost in you brubaker