written by Tini Howard
penciled by Chris Sprouse and Ron Lim
inked by Karl Story, Walden Wong and Scott Hanna
colored by Jesus Aburtov, Erick Arciniega and Israel Silva
The year is 1944. The Second World War is almost over, and Captain America and Bucky are on a reconnaissance mission, deep in enemy territory, when they stumble upon an emaciated woman wandering through the forest. They follow her, only to find that she is one of three people who have escaped from a concentration camp and are hiding in a goat farm. They are Marta, the woman Cap and Bucky followed, and a Roma, Iskra, a Jewish woman, and Volya, the son of Russian immigrants with a dark (but somewhat predictable) secret that impels him to escape Germany at all costs. Cap and Bucky have their work cut out for them as they must now help these three escape to safety, even though they're basically surrounded by Germans.
Marvel's been pretty fond of these "back in the 40s" stories featuring Cap and Bucky, and in truth they've been made even more interesting following Bucky's resurrection and simultaneous retcon into a juvenile killing machine. I was a huge fan of the Captain America and Bucky miniseries that Ed Brubaker, Marc Andreyko and Chris Samnee produced seven years ago, around the time of the first Captain America movie. That was nostalgia done right, and even though that series revisited an old, frequently used story setting, each issue really did feel, like an "untold story."
I cannot, unfortunately, say the same for this story, which seems to be less about Captain America and Bucky and more about the three escaped prisoners they meet. Here, we meet characters who break the usual narrative trope of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, as only one out the three of them is actually Jewish. Howard, descended (like most Americans) from immigrants, presents Marta, a Romani, and Volya, a Russian who was in the camp for a very distinct reason. Notably, both of them have considerably more exposure than Iskra. Unfortunately, because of limited pages and Howard's desire to reveal Volya's thinly-veiled secret late in the issue, we really don't learn a whole lot about any of these characters, and as a result they, Cap, Bucky, and the story all lose out.
In short, unlike The Amazing Spider-man Annual I just reviewed, which revisited a beloved period from a well-known character's past and found a surprisingly fresh story to tell, this story, seems content to swap out an actual story with a heavy-handed attempt at pushing an advocacy, yet again using Nazi Germany as an analogue for Trump's America. While that parallel is certainly not undeserved, it seems to have been given premium over the storytelling itself, which is a shame, because Howard has shown a knack for some pretty snappy dialogue as shown by the exchanges between Cap, Bucky and the prisoners, and some interesting characterization. Again, though, because of so little time to develop these characters, they barely get to leave an impression.
I suppose I'd have been a lot kinder to this story had I not been so blown away by Saladin Ahmed's work over in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual, but one thing this book does have over that one is Chris Sprouse's crisp art, which gets a teeny-tiny boost from the ever-reliable Ron Lim, who works on a few pages here as well. Sprouse, whose work I knew about over when he was working at DC and on Alan Moore's Tom Strong books, is a great choice for this period setting, and he does not disappoint at all. He's not quite Chris Samnee, but hey, I'm okay with that.
6.5/10
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