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Captain America twist not the last word

Captain America is not the first marquee comic book hero to break bad, and if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that he’ll be back.

Normally, I’d put a spoiler warning in front of a sentence like that, but even people who have never cracked open a comic seem to know about the big twist at the end of “Captain America: Steve Rogers” #1, which went on sale May 25. If you don’t want to know any more before reading it yourself, you might want to skip the rest of this column.

The new No. 1 issue comes about a year-and-a-half after the super-soldier serum that gave him his preternatural physical abilities was neutralized, causing Steve to rapidly age decades past AARP membership. His longtime partner Sam Wilson, formerly the Falcon, has wielded the distinctive shield since.

Steve was restored to his more youthful self in the recent “Avengers: Standoff” storyline, which involved a cosmic cube, a Marvel McGuffin that can alter the fabric of reality itself. I’m betting it has something to do with Cap uttering the fateful words “Hail Hydra” on the last page of the new book.

In the movies, Hydra started as a subdivision of the Nazis. When you consider that Cap creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were both Jewish and put the hero on the cover of his debut comic punching Hitler before the United States even entered World War II, that’s obviously going to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths.

In the comics, Hydra has ties to the Nazis, but in most of the stories I read, they were just generic terrorists. Their mission statements and political beliefs were often secondary.

Even in the Captain America issue in question, there are at least three factions of Hydra vying for control, with the one spouting the most offensive crap led by the mega-Nazi known as Red Skull. Cap seems to be aligned with a different version.

Some people are aghast that the issue implies through flashbacks that Steve Rogers has always been a member of Hydra. But it seems like his lifetime of loyalty is a fairly recent development.

The woman who recruits Steve’s mother into Hydra seems to know her son is going to grow up to be someone important. It practically screams time traveler or some sort of manipulation by the aforementioned cosmic cube.

Comics are filled with bad guys who got popular enough to carry their own series, then made a move to, or at least toward, the side of the angels. Much more rare are heroes who have gone bad and stayed that way.

Everyone gets mind-controlled or misled for a little while. Heck, for about three years of real-world time, Dr. Octopus inhabited Spider-Man’s body and tried to take his place in the terrific “Superior Spider-Man” series. But Peter Parker came back.

Hal Jordan, the most famous of DC’s Green Lanterns, went over to the dark side after his home city was destroyed and became the villain Parallax, who nearly wiped out the Green Lantern Corps and played a role in destroying and restarting the entire DC universe (which happens more often than you might expect). Eventually, DC revealed Hal had been possessed by an entity called Parallax and restored him as a full-fledged GL 10 years later.

In a much-derided Avengers event called “The Crossing,” it was discovered that Tony Stark had been working for/controlled by the time-traveling villain Kang for most of his time with the Avengers. He was replaced by a younger version of himself until an even bigger event temporarily wiped the Avengers off the Marvel map. Afterward, original Tony returned, minus the homicidal tendencies.

This Captain America twist is the result of an effort for an interesting story, shock value or a bit of both and probably won’t last very long. It doesn’t really fit with the character but, depending on how writer Nick Spencer plays it out, it could become a memorable footnote in Cap’s history.

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Back Issues writer Evan Bevins can be contacted at ebevins@newsandsentinel.com

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