Marvels Snapshots: Captain America #1: Review

Jun 2020
Mark Russell, Ramon Perez

Story Name:

(No title given)

Review & Comments

Rating:
4.5 stars

Marvels Snapshots: Captain America #1 Review by (January 5, 2021)

Review: An older story arc provides the background for this Marvels tie-in, showing that sometimes it’s the little things that matter in people’s lives (a theme from the original series, which I’m sure is not a coincidence). The world doesn’t need heroes as much as it does repairmen: Felix tells us fixing people’s damaged electronics improves people’s lives. And while we can’t all be heroes, we can sometimes fix what’s broken around us. For more on this issue, check out Viktor Frankl’s story about the starfish, an oddly inspiring lesson. As for the comic, while the art is not the realistic painted Alex Ross stuff that we have come to associate with Marvels (and doesn’t even try to be), it is nice and suits the story well. The biggest surprise in the issue is humor, mainly A.I.M.’s attempts to come off like any other major business, hiding their supervillain roots with a finely satirical edge. Overall, pretty cool.

Comments: Everywhere else the title is given as CAPTAIN AMERICA: MARVELS SNAPSHOTS; we’re a bunch of rebels. Cameos by Daredevil, Spider-Man, Aunt May, Mind-Wave, Doctor Octopus, Blizzard. The original Madbomb arc was in CAPTAIN AMERICA #193-200 and marked Jack Kirby’s return to Marvel as writer and artist.





 

Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Marvels Snapshots: Captain America #1 Synopsis by Peter Silvestro

When the Madbomb went off, New York was plunged into violent madness and it took Captain America and the Falcon to put a stop to it. The human toll was staggering and the city needed a long time to recover. But in the slums of the South Bronx, no help was forthcoming: the neighborhood just kept crumbling into ruin and despair. Felix Waterhouse, a teenage tech prodigy whose brother died in the incident, had to give up his dream of college to continue working in his father’s TV repair shop. Then one day a representative of Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.), having heard about Felix’s expertise with electronics, stops by the shop to offer him a high-paying job with the firm, assuring Felix that the stories he’s heard about A.I.M. being a supervillain organization are exaggerated. Felix is skeptical and continues working in his father’s shop. Then, when he hears Captain America on television talking about how “the nation stands” while his neighborhood as been abandoned, he smashes the TV and accepts the job offer with A.I.M. And so, Felix goes to work, finding it challenging and rewarding. Then he is asked to look at a problem with their biggest project—which he recognizes as a Madbomb. He accepts their assurances that they have no intention of using it. After talking with his family about the original incident, Felix goes into work quietly and sabotages the Madbomb to emit an electronic feedback pulse but he is caught and about to be killed when he triggers the pulse, which affects much of the area above A.I.M.’s lab under Manhattan. Cap, Falcon, and Iron Man team up to invade the A.I.M. lab, defeat the baddies, and rescue Felix….

A few days later, Tony Stark arrives to offer Felix a job with his company; Felix declines, seeing that as no different from his offer from A.I.M.; what they need is for someone to fix the neighborhood. A short time later, Stark is building in the area and Cap talks to Felix, thanking him for reminding Cap that a broken world doesn’t need heroes…it needs repairmen….



Ramon Perez
Ramon Perez
Rico Renzi
Alex Ross (Cover Penciler)
Alex Ross (Cover Inker)
Alex Ross (Cover Colorist)
Letterer: Joe Sabino.

Characters

Listed in Alphabetical Order.

Captain America
Captain America

(Steve Rogers)
Falcon
Falcon

(Sam Wilson)
Iron Man
Iron Man

(Tony Stark)



> Marvels Snapshots: Captain America: Book info and issue index

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