Things Past

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Four scans apiece from Captain America #608 and Captain America: Forever Allies #1.
 

In the main title, Zemo's campaign of sabotage continues; New Cap and Black Widow defeat his minion, Beetle II (she doesn't do much better than the original Beetle), and interrogate her.  The only thing she says is that she's working for someone who knows who Bucky is; Natasha eventually deduces that it's Zemo, given the clues hidden in his attacks so far.  Then, leaving Thunderbolts HQ (in Natasha hat news, she's got a beret with the Black Widow logo on it), they run into some reporters:






Guice's art is becoming progressively more like Kirby's in terms of facial expressions, particularly on Bucky (Natasha, meanwhile, looks very Gene Colan through most of this issue).

Given the solicits for #611, the direction of Zemo's scheme is rather obvious, but this should be an interesting story.

The other comic with Bucky that came out this week, Roger Stern's Forever Allies miniseries, actually also has a bit dealing with his secret identity; this seems to be set during "Dark Reign" still (which would make sense, given that the present-day segments take place in the timeframe of the original Young Allies special that came out last year), so Bucky is undercover using a fake ID Natasha gave him for part of it (as "Barney Jamieson"; I am forced to assume Natasha put this identity together while giggling madly).

Bucky attends the funeral of Washington Jones, the last member of the Young Allies to die; while there, he sees a Japanese woman who looks just like Lady Lotus, one of their old villains.  Bucky investigates whether she's still around, and we flash back to 1943:




Stern's approach to the rather, uh, period-specific depiction of Jones (as well as the general quality of the comics) is one of the more interesting uses of metacommentary I've seen in comics lately.  Given how Bucky repeatedly states that the publisher also totally ripped off their imagines and never paid them for it, it's especially funny.

Lady Lotus is up to no good, so the boys go out and look into it.  Lotus is one of the few Japanese villains in Captain America's history; you rarely see stories set in the Pacific Theatre.

Bucky finds that there's a woman who looks like Lotus and has psychic powers in super-jail in Colorado, so he heads out there using his fake ID as a reporter to go see her.  The guards bring her into the room, and Bucky immediately declares that that woman isn't Lady Lotus.