AVENGERS #387 & CAPTAIN AMERICA #440

"ISLAND OF SPIRITS"
Story: Bob Harras & Terry Kavanagh | Writer: Bob Harras
Breakdowns: Mike Deodato | Finishes: Tom Palmer
Colorist: John Kalisz | Letterer: Bill Oakley
Editor: Ralph Macchio | Editor-in-Chief: Mark Gruenwald

The Plot: CAPTAIN AMERICA #440: "Dawn's Early Light" by Mark Gruenwald, Dave Hoover, and Marie Severin, Dan Bulandi, & Don Hudson: Captain America tries to recruit his old friend, Demolition Man, for a mission to the island of Boca Caliente, but D-Man is unable to attend. Later, Cap meets up with his team -- his trainees, Jack Flag and Free Spirit, his former partner, the Falcon, his pilot, Zack Moonhunter, and his tech expert, Fabian Stankowicz. The group receives a briefing from Nick Fury on an energy surge from Boca Caliente which read to SHIELD as similar to the Cosmic Cube. Then Fury departs, and Cap's team heads out. On Boca Caliente, A.I.M. operative MODAM enters a chamber bathed with energy. Meanwhile, Cap's enemy Superia and her right hand, Snapdragon, observe Boca Caliente from a boat offshore.

Captain America, Falcon, Jack Flag, and Free Spirit swim to Boca Caliente and split up. At Avengers Mansion, Black Widow says that the readings Captain America recently went to investigate on Boca Caliente are identical to those she recently tracked in Canada, and the heroes depart to catch up with Cap. On the island, Jack Flag and Free Spirit witness the arrival of the Red Skull, who takes out two guards and enters A.I.M.'s complex. A moment later, the guards rise and metamorph, revealing themselves to be A.I.M. Adaptoids, and attack Jack and Free Spirit. On the island's beach, Fabian activates a small army of robots and sends them out to create a diversion. Meanwhile, Cap and Falcon find a deep crater, and Cap jumps toward it just as an energy flare emerges, separating him from Falcon. As Falcon searches for Cap, he is attacked by another Adaptoid. Meanwhile, Cap lays paralyzed until Superia finds him and injects something into his cheek.

AVENGERS #440: A young boy on Boca Caliente finds Captain America, out of his armor, laying on the ground. Cap gets up, and Bucky appears to greet him. Meanwhile, the Avengers have arrived on the island and engaged with A.I.M. troops. They rout the villains, and Black Widow reveals the readings she's been tracking recently are those of a Cosmic Cube. A moment later, Quicksilver's thoughts come to life thanks to the Cube energy, and the Avengers find themselves in the camp where he grew up, with his foster father, Django Maximoff, welcoming them. Meanwhile, Bucky helps Captain America fight off some A.I.M. agents. Inside the A.I.M. complex, the Red Skull stalks the agent in command, Brannex. Outside, two Adaptoids battle and defeat Jack Flag and Free Spirit. Elswehwere, the Avengers sit around a campfire with Django. Meanwhile, Cap, Bucky, and the boy find Falcon and his Adaptoid foe both unconscious. Cap suddenly weakens, and then a moment later A.I.M. operative MODOK arrives.

Continuity Notes: One footnote this issue, as the Cosmic Cube's habit of bringing people's thoughts to life reminds Hercules about all that unfortunate business with Taylor Madison.

Assemble: No, and we're running out of time! The crossover ends next issue, then we have one installment left before we stop. ("Avengers Assemble!" count: 11 in 54 issues to date.)

My Thoughts: I'll discuss "Taking A.I.M." in its entirety next week. This week, let's talk about... Captain America's battle armor!

You may recall that there were a few hints back around issue 375 that Cap was getting easily winded and so forth. That lined up with the beginning of a saga in his own series titled "Fighting Chance", in which Cap learned that the super soldier serum was failing. The year-long arc saw Cap putting his affairs in order, getting ready for his impending demise. As of this point, the serum is on its last legs (and therefore so is Cap), and the armor, created by Hank Pym and Tony Stark, is his last ditch effort to compensate and keep fighting until he can fight no more.

The majority opinion on the armor seems to be that it's awful, it's the nineties at their worst, it's a nadir for Captain America and certainly the low point of Mark Gruenwald's long run, etc.* And for all I know, that's the correct assessment. But I see it differently. See, there was a semi-recurring bit (as in, it popped up maybe two or three times, tops), during Gruenwald's CAP run in the early nineties, where Captain America, as a virtuous paragon of "classic" super heroes, would be contrasted with the then current "extreme" characters like Wolverine, Cable, and so forth. There's even a bit in one issue where Cap passes a kid who, in a "meta" moment, expresses what cool comic book characters Wolverine and Punisher are, and Cap is flabbergasted. "THOSE are the heroes you admire?" he asks.

We'll probably never know for sure, but I've long viewed the battle armor as Gruenwald's response to all that. "You kids like extreme heroes? Fine!" Suddenly Cap is dying, he's wearing a battlesuit that flies and launches little (non-lethal) missiles, etc. He's a Captain America for the nineties. Not because Gruenwald wanted to give him a makeover, but because he wanted to screw with the fans who felt Cap was too old-fashioned. To show them they should be careful what they wish for. The armor is all wrong for Captain America -- and that's its point!

I really think my theory holds water, especially when you consider that, after all is said and done, Gruenwald doesn't even return Cap to normal. He kills him off in his final issue! Cap goes extreme, then he dies. It doesn't get much more nineties than that, and I will maintain until concrete evidence proves otherwise, that Gruenwald did it all as a critique of what was popular at the time. (I seem to recall reading somewhere that the "Death of Superman" saga was conceived for similar reasons; to show fans why Superman should still be relevant among the excesses of nineties heroics.)

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*People say that last thing about the "Capwolf" storyline as well, which I've never understood. That story is about as inoffensive as they come. It was just Gruenwald having some old-fashioned, Silver Age style fun! (And that story also featured the afore-mentioned Wolverine and Cable, to boot -- it was possibly one of the earliest cases of Gruenwald critiquing their popularity in the series.)