Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #3 is Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes in confrontations.

[thanekos]

Issue #2'd ended with " the Redacted " confronting Steve in Germany, and Bucky confronting Peggy Carter in Madripoor.

The parties concerned were concerned with the Century Game - a game with five players, where the world's the board and everything in it's the pieces.

Bucky and Peggy discussed what sounded like moves in that game, over an interrupted baccarat table.





" .. Steve's better off staying the hell away. "

(The dates in Bucky's first point are a bit off - the development of VX is rooted in that of the insecticide Amiton, which happened in the 1950s.

" Britain traded VX to the United States for nukes in 1956 " might be describing a deal for a specific quantity of nuclear devices - Britain's first atomic test was in 1952.

Having the resources of the Power Elite from the Cap run preceding this and Captain America: Symbol of Truth snapped up as part of the Century Game is a nice acknowledgement of the " secretive power players " similarities between the two.)

In Germany, in the " green power plant " called the Forge, Steve fought the Redacted - humanoid, burnished metal, arms that jabbed and stabbed.

He opened a pipe in his enemy's face - sent the Redacted flying backwards.



" It's another lie. "

Steve drove the Redacted off through further judicious application of the power surging through the Forge, then turned his attention to what the lie was covering up.

' It's not the facility they wanted. ' Steve thought, considering the Forge having been a move in the Century Game.

' It's what's buried underneath. '



A message started playing.



(Yes, this is a retcon - a deftly done one.

Dr. Agboje's name was previously mentioned in issue #2 - after the unnerving end of issue #1, Steve'd wondered about the history of his shield.

A friend who " did computers " had dove into archived government records and found " requisition paperwork " crediting Dr. Myron MacLain for the industrial design - and Dr. Agboje for the alloy finishing.

That harmonizes with the description of the creation of Steve's shield in 1984's Captain America #303 by Dr. MacLain, a metallurgist dug out of a late-'60s Avengers story.



Dr. MacLain's work consists of inadvertently synthesizing the shield's composition, and then casting it into its disc form.

Dr. Agboje's work can be easily fit into " The government took my disc.. painted it, and gave it to.. Captain America. " - just include " coating with vibranium " in " painting ", and read " the government " as " the Outer Circle " in at least part.)

Another voice confronted Steve - a broadcast from a hologram.

It was the Machine, one player of the Century Game - one member of the Outer Circle.

She'd wanted the Forge just to keep Steve from that message.

Since he'd heard it anyway, she went for her fallback - setting off bombs that'd found their way into the lair under the Forge.



(The implication is that Dr. Agboje was the Machine's son, and that she's OK with the circumstances of his death.)

The Machine blinked out.

Steve, using his shield and lava's tendency to flow downwards, was able to escape the lair's destruction.

In Madripoor, Peggy said " I think I'm done playing cards, Mr. Barnes. "



The Madripoor bar was vacated - it was just Bucky, fighting Peggy over her ties to the Outer Circle.



They were throwing pieces of abandoned games at each other.



" If you really believe this nonsense, you're a risk to anyone and everyone around you. "



As Peggy left Bucky, the Redacted returned to Steve - not to him in Germany, but to where he was living in New York, in Manhattan's Lower East Side.



(The kid punching the bag's someone that Steve's teaching self-defense.

Pagecount's a little over 6 and 6/10ths of 20 from August 2022's Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #3 and 7/10ths of one page from the 22-page Captain America #303 back in December 1984.

Writing for the former's Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly - art's Carmen Carnero, letters're Joe Caramagna, and colors're Nolan Woodard.

Writing for the latter's Mike Carlin - pencils're Paul Neary, inks're Dennis Janke, letters're Diana Albers, and colors're Ken Feduniewicz.

Publisher's Marvel.)

Comments

[akodo_rokku]

Really, Peggy? Was all that necessary?

[tcampbell1000]

To be successful, a comic-book retcon has to be more plausible or resonant than what came before it. Ideally, it should correct some flaw. For instance, Mark Waid noticed that the code name "Mr. Fantastic" seemed a little egotistical for a man of science who felt guilty over deforming his friends. Waid explained this away as a marketing strategy. The guilt-ridden Reed was trying to make himself and his friends larger than life, because he felt that otherwise, they'd be seen as monsters. It's a nice idea! It's tender and sweet, it aligns with what we know about Reed, and it reinforces why we like him.

This story's first mistake is thinking that the design of Captain America's shield would benefit from a similar explanation. But no one was wondering about this one. If you translate stars-and-stripes iconography to a circular canvas, aiming for rotational symmetry, then you're probably going to get something that looks like Cap's shield, more or less. It looks that way BECAUSE AMERICA. The concept of "ACTUALLY, it's a symbol of the SECRET CIRCLE" reminds me of two kinds of people. One, Twitter users who'll pick apart the etymology of your words, find something that meant something bad three hundred years ago, and use that to "prove" you're a secret racist. And two, defenders of the Confederate flag who insist that "ACTUALLY, it's a symbol of our HERITAGE."

Symbols do not have fixed, secret meanings that override their present-day public ones!

And if you had to do something like this, why pick the one aspect of Captain America's design with the most inherently obvious explanation? We've all known those wings on his head were kind of silly for decades, call your conspiracy "The Messenger Gods" and go after those! Or go pick on Superman's diamond-pentagon emblem or Green Lantern's ring design! Stop trying to explain things that already make sense!

This wrongheaded symbology is, appropriately, symbolic of the deeper problem with a story like this. "You thought history was a complex series of interactions between countless agents of varying power levels, but oops, history was actually just this one tiny collective manipulating everything except the things we like! Bamboozled again. Captain America was an inside job!" At least Peggy's too smart to buy into this crap.

The Redacted is a compelling enough adversary, basically just the Fury scaled down to Captain America's level. And "History will not remember you" does speak to the horror of our mortality and the mortality of our memory. But I don't even begin to understand how the SC plans to make it so "history will not remember" the guy who punched Hitler, shaped the Avengers, and saved the universe about seventeen times. Surely having his story rewritten is more of a threat to conjure with?

Writing Captain America can't be an easy gig. You've got to balance escapist thrills with at least trying to Say Something About The Country. I understand wanting to hold up a dark mirror to the elite. But I've almost always found conspiracy theory to be a childish flavor of meta. It's as if the writer is casting themself as the villain, hissing, "You can't win, heroes, THEY control your every thought and gesture!" Until it's time to make everything better by destroying the people responsible for all of modern history, of course. Except the parts we like. Somehow.

Five years later: "It was us, Captain--it was us all along! The Council of Eukaryotes has always been pulling your strings! The clue is in YOUR NAME! DIDN'T YOU EVER WONDER WHY 'CAPTAIN AMERICA' IS AN ANAGRAM FOR 'PARAMECIA ANTIC'??!!"

[sadoeuphemist]

Counterpoint: it's already well-established that Captain America's shield serves as a symbol for a sinister cabal exerting their hegemony over the globe. It represents the United States of America.

But being a comic book, you can't just have Captain America fighting against American foreign policy. You have to invent a supervillain for him to punch. And being an American comic book, it's a bit much to have the United States being run by supervillains this whole time. Hence, the global conspiracy much larger than the USA that just so happens (what are the odds!) to use American iconography as their calling card.

It is a throughline in the book that the stars and stripes (star and concentric circles, whatever) is in fact a symbol that means many different things to many different people; that the shield does, in fact, represent Captain America's ideals, and not those of some generic nationalist government supersoldier. It is missing the point to say they should instead try to explain some trivial odd detail of Captain America's iconography. BECAUSE AMERICA is the entire point.

[beyondthefringe]

I like what this story is doing so far, and it's an interesting enough take on the idea... even if yet ANOTHER secret society manipulating the world seems a little much given how many others are out there doing the same thing.

I wonder how the Outer Circle relates to the whole Hydra/SHIELD/Leviathan thing which was going on at roughly the same time... (i.e. Hickman's Secret Warriors run). I wonder if there's overlap between the organizations.

[tcampbell1000]

Agreed on most of this. Calling the whole country, with all its best and its worst aspects, a "sinister cabal" is a bit much for me. But I take your meaning, and criticism of America has been on the table for the series since the Stan Lee days at least, and more memorably in the Englehart ones.

For the rest of it, I think we're largely saying the same things. A secret society manipulating choice events is certainly an idea that Captain America has done often before. But you gotta be careful with conspiracy stories, or else you end up with "IT WAS ME, BARRY," just on a geopolitical scale.

[windleopard2]

Who's the Fury?

Out of curiosity, how well do you think the Metal Gear games, assuming you are familiar with them, handle this kind of thing?

[cainofdreaming]

[windleopard2]

This doesn't answer my question.

[beyondthefringe]

In short: an unstoppable killing machine originally created by an all-powerful insane mutant on an alternate world, which killed that world's superheroes before moving on to menace Captain Britain. Naturally, it's become progressively less scary with later appearances, including turning up in the current X-titles.

[windleopard2]

Thank you.

[deh_tommy]

These days, the Fury is now an entire army and is basically nothing more than magitech Sentinels with the serial numbers scratched off, their last appearance having them get mowed down by the dozens.

[tcampbell1000]

I'm not nearly as familiar with Metal Gear as an old friend of mine is, but from what I've seen, it's generally all right.

I don't mean to deny the existence of conspiracies: we've always had people of influence gathering to perform shady doings. My issue with conspiracy theories is that they tend to underestimate chaos theory and the complex interactions of individuals. They reduce the complicated world to puppets dancing on just a few strings. And when people try to call this out for the oversimplification it is, they just accuse those critics of being naive and blind. But cynicism is just naivete with a frown.

[windleopard2]

Which reminds me. I'm currently watching the sixth Lupin animated series, the first arc of which deals a secret society named Raven which is responsible for the death of John Watson (yes, that Watson. Just role with it).

The finale of the arc reveals that [Raven had long since dissolved due to being decentralized and fragmented. The few surviving members were completely unaware of this and only carried out what they assumed where Raven's orders out of fear of higher-ups that weren't even around anymore.]

An interesting twist on the secret conspiracy trope.

[nyadnar17]

I have no idea how a character as brightly dressed and earnest as Captain America works as a spy thriller but hot damn if the formula doesn't work.

Gonna give these books a try.

[shakalooloo]

The shield has one fewer ring than it used to. It used to be red-white-red with the blue starred cicrle inside that. The shield in that two-page spread lacks one of the rings/circles? Are they counting the blue circle as one of the rings?

[thanekos]

Visual license for that " red, white, and blue " effect - the shield's still three rings and a circle, like the recess Steve fits it into in the third scan.

[starrbeardd]

This wants to be a Hickman comic pretty badly. Not just the conspiracy plot, the villains that look like they are from East of West that do not match superhero aesthetics, but the constant snotty superior know it all dialogue from everyone all the time (maybe not Cap himself to be fair.).