There is a brave, purposeful weirdness to everything Rick Remender writes. He mines the obscure, branching into tunnels of comic book history to create stories centering on wild characters from eras past. He retcons and builds his own centuries deep lore. Yet he doesn’t talk down to his readers. He lets his creativity run ahead then cranes his neck back, yelling at his readers to catch up with him.
I imagine him plotting a story, getting to a pivotal intersection of the narrative and asking himself “what is the most bonkers thing that can happen?” He embodies the crazy, walless wonder that is comic books.
But being odd and wild isn’t a strong enough base to build greatness.What transports Remender from a fun writer to a exceptional one is the unexpected way he can suddenly strike to core of something. How he can make all the weirdness he builds circle a relatable idea and then connects the reader to it.
All-New Captain America #4 is an issue that clearly demonstrates the strong themes Remender has been maintaining over his entire Captain America run.
Remender’s Cap run has always been centered around fatherhood and how a father imprints on his childern. This idea is present even back during the Dimension Z story arch, where Steve Rogers relationship with his adopted son Ian redeemed the lack of a relationship Rogers had with his own father. He also included how Jet Black learns to break free from the image of right and wrong her father, Armin Zola, imprinted on her creating a central theme connecting many characters’ struggles together.
As the series progressed and Sam Wilson inherited the role of Captain America, we saw how his father’s selflessness and death inspired Wilson to hold the shield.
In issue #4, this theme is carried by Wilson.
Sam Wilson’s accomplishments are beyond marvelous. He is a superhero. He has saved the world oodles of times. Hell, he is Captain America. If the man was real, he would be one of the greatest men that has ever lived. Yet, the issue opens with Sam basted in regret and struggling with a feeling of underachievement. This regret steamed from him figuring that by this time in his life he would have a family, that he would be a father.
It puts the much mentioned theme of fatherhood in a different sphere, above celebrity, above heroism, above even being a savoir of earth. It establishes what is at stake in the rest of the book.
The current evil that Captain America is battling against is an attempt by Hydra and Baron Zemo to sterilize most of mankind so Hydra can repopulate the world with a master race.
Not only is mankind at risk, but so is Wilson’s potential fatherhood and the fatherhood of everyone else deemed unworthy by Hydra. It feels like the reveal of this run’s true conflict.
Heroes battle masked, maladjusted radicals for the fate of the world all the time in comic books. It is trite. With a slight tweak, Remender has invigorated a stale conflict.
A hero’s life or the fate of the world is not what is at risk in Remender’s Captain America. Rather it is his purpose, his ultimate personal completion. All of that is weighed against the fate of humankind, but that latter cost seems smaller, like the world won’t be worth saving if the possibility of being a parent was removed.
I have read issues of Remender’s work were on the last page he blows up planet earth. Watching Sam Wilson own potential fatherhood start to slip away as the issue closes is so much more horrific than the destruction of the entire planet. It penetrates past the destruction of worlds or lives and becomes a destruction of soul, a destruction of dreams.
It is crippling to watch happen.
Yes, this is a comic book, so the whole world will not be sterilized. Sam will probably pull through and save us all, because there is a status quo that Marvel is obligated to keep for the sake of its connected universe, but for one issue Remender was able to put that inevitability out of our brains and show us a deep nightmare preparing to break a man in a way that is new to us.
Remender has taken the theme of fatherhood and pushed it through the wild and dark mesh through which, he filters his stories. The idea that he is trying to communicate to his readers is starting to congeal and it is a darkly beautiful thing to watch.
