Waid's Wrap-Up: A Review of Captain America #704

written by Mark Waid
drawn by Leonardo Romero
colored by Jordie Bellaire

Comics legend Mark Waid wraps up his ten-issue tenure on Captain America and his four-issue dystopian storyline with an issue that ties up a rather engaging storyline a little too abruptly, and perhaps a tad inappropriately.

Having unleashed the Red Skull on the Kree Empire that has, for the last several decades, been manipulating the American people, historian and descendant of Captain America Jack Rogers scrambles to save the world, knowing that when the dust settles, he basically promised Red Skull the world as his footstool. To defeat the Kree, Rogers and his fellow "resistance" fighters resort to torture and chemical warfare. Faced with the Skull at the end, Rogers takes a huge gamble on which not only the fate of his son but of humankind rests.

For an issue on which so much was riding, this story almost inevitably disappointed, but in no small part because it seemed to want to have its morally-compromised cake and eat it too. Part of what attracted me to the character arc of Jack Rogers is how emphatically stated it is that, while he has Captain America's blood in his veins, he is no Captain America, and therefore has to resort to other means to win the day. This instantly made him a sympathetic character, and even though many of the decisions he makes throughout the story up until this point may be questionable, they remain understandable. This much remains consistent; Waid has shown what a man with his back against the wall is ready to do.

But when the arc ties up (as it inevitably does) and the proverbial end credits roll, I have to wonder why Jack Rogers' actions, which were actually somewhat horrific when you think about it, somehow come across as justified, and why the suggested conclusion, that the United States almost fell because it didn't guard itself against an alien threat, seems to glorify the xenophobia and isolationism that has made the United States on the most hated countries in the world today. Truth be told, that's not necessarily bad storytelling but to wrap all of it up in the American flag and declare that it's the sort of thing that Cap would have done feels like a perversion of the character and his legacy.

Could this be Mark Waid's real critique of what America has become? It feels a tad cynical, I'll have to say, but wow, if this is his left-handed swipe at what America has become, it hits a bit harder than his milquetoast six-issue run with Chris Samnee.

The troubling conclusion to this story notwithstanding, I still enjoyed Waid's creation, Jack Rogers, the historian with super soldier blood and feet of clay.

Leonardo Romero, this time unaided by any special guest artist, turns in outstanding work that continues to evoke Chris Samnee, though I wasn't a fan of the way he drew the Red Skull's...well, skull.

This is goodbye for now for Waid, and even though his run on this book may have been patchy in places, at least the stories he had to tell were still worth reading.

7/10