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The series ends with an appearance by another couple of old FA villains, Double Header and the Buzz Bomber, as Flagg and S.P.I.C.E. (whose name I'm getting sick of typing) make their way to the mastermind behind the bounty on FA's head, Round Robin. The final fight is a bit anticlimactic, but it serves the purpose of convincing John Flagg that Fighting American is needed back in the world.
Which is what his military bosses had hoped would happen when they hired Robin in the first place.
I think that if the Awesome Universe had continued, I'd have loved to see some interactions between FA and Supreme, or Doctor Night. This universe had so, so much potential, which is, I think, why I'm so obsessed with getting all of their titles, even the ones that are kind of sub-par. Which is not really a fair thing to say, because the really good titles are really, really good, so even the sub-par ones are pretty fantastic comics.
Fighting American, in this incarnation, is a very interesting character, and I think having used the retirement story line for Captain America could have been cool. We see it to a certain extent in the MCU - after Civil War, Steve Rogers really isn't Captain America again, aside from being in the costume at the end of Endgame. I'm sure there's other moments, but even if he's in the costume, he's not really Cap again. Really, he ceases to be Captain America when America ceases to support him. It's the old argument about the character, really. Does he represent the U.S. as it is now, as a patriotic hero that embodies what the country is at the moment, or does he represent what the U.S. could have been if it hadn't been bogged down by corruption, white nationalism (accidentally typed "shite" there!), and capitalism? For me, Cap, at his best (see Gruenwald's work in the 80s), is the dream of America, rather than its reality, and those are always the best stories to tell with him, the ones that question where things went wrong, and whether or not that spirit of freedom and innovation can survive in the urban sink that America has become.
I wonder if perhaps a book on Captain America is about due, given the awful, awful turn the country has taken in the last few years.
More to follow.
Further Reading and Related Posts
For more on the writer of this series, have a look at the other Jeph Loeb comics I've read.
I wrote a piece for Sequart on Steve Gerber's Captain America that I'm pretty proud of too.
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