Escaping the Grave

[colonel_green]

Three scans from Black Widow #5 and four from Captain America #609.


After defeating the arc's villain, things in Marjorie Liu's Black Widow story wrap up; included is a bit here that addresses one thing some people wondered about in my post on #4.





Meanwhile, over in Captain America, Baron Zemo continues to be a very naughty boy.  He leaves a message in Bucky's apartment (seemingly written in lipstick on his bathroom mirror) to meet him where Bucky was born, which he interprets as being Fort LeHigh, Virginia, where he met Steve for the first time.



They fight.

Meanwhile, Steve, Sam, and Natasha fight Iron Hand Hauptmann, Zemo's minion through this arc; Hauptmann does pretty well, really, considering he's a nobody fighting three recognizable characters.  Eventually, of course, the heroes close the distance.




That's what you get for calling yourself "Iron Hand", dude.

You'll notice how those two pages look rather different from the preceding one; this issue is a particularly compelling demonstration of how different inking can make an artist's pencils look, because there's one artist (Butch Guice), one colourist (Paul Mounts), and three different inkers on these pages.  The results vary considerably, with some emphasizing the Kirby/Colan-esque elements, others bringing out elements of Guice's more realistic style.

Anyway, Zemo's been Batmaning everybody this entire arc, and defeats Bucky.



Zemo's playing pronoun games and such here; from Brubaker's comments on CBR about how it was good people were speculating about his motives, I'm guessing (based on Hauptmann's above comments) that he dislikes the idea of Bucky escaping his past in the way he's been trying to do, given that Zemo himself has never managed that.  Given how he's avoided killing anyone so far in this story, I'm starting to wonder if this isn't meant to be a Hunter Zolomon-style gambit.


 

Comments

[alexanderlucard]

Pretty much everyone during Civil War. Reed, Tony, Skrull Hank, Steve and of course Hawkeye/Ronin championed him big time. Hell, Zemo was the one that helped Steve break in to the Negative Zone. He gave then-cap the way in and all the pass codes because he was posing as a double agent since Tony's side thought there was no way BARON ZEMO could actually be siding with Captain America.

In Avengers/Thunderbolts, Zemo was shown to be one of the most popular and trusted heroes in the world and the big theme of that min-series was that Cap (who is my favorite Marvel character btw) was actually being the prejudiced and racist one, not Zemo and Steve's realization that the two had flip-flopped and Captain was hating Zemo II simply because his father was his WII arch-enemy and Bucky's murderer and not giving the son a chance to truly redeem himself. He was looking at Zemo II as his Nazi father and not the man (and hero) he strove to become. It was actually pretty epic.

[thehood]

Except Zemo only helped Steve so he as part of his Master plan. You know, where he went agaisnt the Grandmaster to gain reality warping power and take over the world?

Sorry, but Zemo isn't a hero. He's a Zemo.