A lot of people do both, and a lot of people write or draw for both, but I think that the general reader is either DC brained or Marvel brained. Like many things, it can be rectified with study, but often the sheer volume can get to you. Over the years I have learned a lot about DC through sheer osmosis, but Marvel doesn’t penetrate my mind the same way, and the MCU, with its increasingly sanded edges, doesn’t really match up with the comics.
I’m sure that at some point that I’m going to read an X-Men run that will explode my mind, and I am well aware that my stances on comics are even more wildly subjective than those on written literature. But I said what I said.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is an iconic run, and it bears very little resemblance to the 2014 film of the same name. It also may not be helpful to read in isolation, because if you dig a little bit further it seems that there was some sort of soft(?) reboot somewhere along the way, and there’s a copious amount of Captain America lore to accommodate for all of the times he was or wasn’t defrosted over the years.
Technically, the Winter Soldier arc is only considered to be issues 8-9 and 11-14 of Volume 5 of Captain America. Mercifully, Marvel collected Issues 1-6, Out of Time and issue 7, The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe, which go a long way both to contextualising all of this and suggesting that maybe arcs and numbering can be inherently arbitrary.
Russian businessman Aleksander Lukin has taken possession of the Cosmic Cube, and has been using it to bend the world to his whims. Steve Rogers is tracing the apparent death of Red Skull and is constantly one step behind in foiling a series of terrorist plots launched by A.I.D., the Skull’s true believers.
When a mysterious assassin known only as the Winter Soldier shows up to do the bidding of Lukin, Nick Fury investigates his identity while hiding his suspicions from Steve.
Something you’ll notice about this is that Steve Rogers, when he’s not being a cipher, is something of a dick. He’s a decorated war hero who fought in actual campaigns, so he’s not a wide-eyed naif. However, without that character point, Brubaker’s Captain America is something of a drab character. He shows up, he reacts, he gets things wrong. Most of the time Brubaker seems to be treating him as a blunt object to be aimed at an incoming threat and, even when it’s Steve’s own idea, he almost feels like he has as little agency as the Winter Soldier himself. Apparently this is due to residual guilt from the just completed Disassembled arc of The Avengers, which would go on to birth House of M, all of which is designed to give someone trying to unpick this twenty years later a headache.
But where The Winter Soldier does shine is in the construction of that entity’s identity, from the origin story to his own version of being a Man Out of Time. This Winter Soldier has a rebellious streak and, even under mind control, almost seems more of his own person than Steve does here.
Steve Epting’s art often doesn’t help, frequently reinforcing the stereotype that many artists can’t draw women’s faces. Otherwise, much of it is serviceable; special mention goes to the flashbacks, drawn by Michael Lark, which really do stand apart from the modern-day storytelling.
The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe, drawn by John Paul Leon, is perhaps the single strongest entry in the story, detailing as it does one of the fill-in Captain Americas (Captains America?) who suffered from a degraded batch of super soldier serum. It helps to contextualise the gaps in Captain America history in a way that it’s safe enough to wave away, it tells its own story, and it ties in thematically to the larger run. It’s somewhat similar, but not really, to “Made of Wood” outshining The Man Who Laughs in the collection of the same name — thus far (in my experience), Brubaker works best in the macro.
The Cosmic Cube itself is a well utilised artefact, with actual repercussions for the use of its powers. It’s always been a cool looking device despite its simplicity, and it is justifiably fearsome here. Thanks to its presence, it also means that everything can be set up and resolved in a far less prosaic way than anything you see in the cinema. The final battle between Captain America and the Winter Soldier ends with two actions that could be considered — and are — hard core. It’s the sort of thing that you sign up for; when technology is indistinguishable from magic, call that cosmic.
A fun thing to note is that this came out a few years before the MCU canonised Tony Stark, so the Iron Man here has limitations as to what he can do before he has to answer to a board of investors, and he can’t be seen to be engaging in (literal) corporate warfare. He’s even allowed to cut something of a pathetic figure. There used to be a different orthodoxy, and Stark got way worse from here before Jon Favreau rehabilitated him.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes a bit of getting your head around, but it also serves as a good jumping off point if for whatever reason you do want to start following Captain America. The confusingly named Captain America Volume 5 comprises Brubaker’s entire 50 issue run, said to be among the finest work ever to bear the character’s name. In the issues comprising this volume, almost every element is more interesting than the title character himself, who only comes into something approaching his own for the explosive finale.
It’s also hilarious that they took a month off partway through the run for a House of M tie-in. Comics! You have to laugh. Or hold your head in your hands and pray that someone’s drawn you a map.
December 2025 Update: Since writing this, I know a lot more about comics and have some very different feelings about so many of them. I know if I read Winter Soldier again, I would have a completely different read on it – and I probably wouldn’t read it in such isolation. It’s funny how a year changes you – and now I understand “volumes” in comics. It’s one word that means so many different things.
