Marvel Announces New CAPTAIN AMERICA and AVENGERS!
Marvel Comics is really stirring things up in their comic book universe. First Thor and now Captain America and The Avengers.
Joe Quesada, Marvel's Chief Creative Officer, announced that Sam Wilson, a.k.a. The Falcon, will be the new Captain America. What happened to Steve Rogers? Well, he lost his superhero strength and turned into a 90-year-old man both physically and mentally. He's obviously in no condition to fight carry his shield and fight to protect the world.
I don't really care that Wilson is taking his place, but I'm not a big fan of what they did with Steve Rogers. The new comic series is being written by Rick Remender and Stuart Immonen, and this is what Remender said in a statement to Marvel:
"This is the fireworks factory we’re arriving at, and now everything’s going to blow up and be very pretty and exciting to look at. It leads into an evolution of Steve Rogers’ character that I had very early when I was given the job. I think that it’s important with these stories to do things that are natural and make sense and have an inherent logic to the universe, but are also constantly shifting and exciting, keeping the drama high. In order to do that it really comes down to creating new dynamics.
“I’ve been having a lot of fun writing Sam. It’s a completely different attitude. The fact that he’s not a soldier shifts things up a bit. Sam’s not going to be Steve. Steve can be very rigid. That can be kind of joyless at times, whereas Sam is absolutely not that."
Editor Tom Brevoort adds:
“While Sam shares many of Steve’s beliefs in a general sense, he’s also a very different person with a very different background. He didn’t grow up in the 1930s, he’s a modern day man in touch with the problems of the 21st Century. For most of his professional life, Sam has worked as a social worker, so he’s seen the worst of urban society up close, and how crime, poverty, lack of social structure and opportunity can affect the community. So he’s got perhaps a greater focus on the plight of the common man, and perhaps a greater empathy for the underprivileged than maybe even Steve himself. He’s also not a military man, so he’s more apt to be instinctively skeptical of any situation that calls for just following orders. Sam, like Steve, will be led by his personal morality and beliefs as to what is right and what is wrong—and where his beliefs may differ in their shading from those of the previous Cap are where the interesting stories will be found.”
It's explained that Rogers will still "employ his skills as the new Cap’s remote strategic advisor, running missions from his headquarters in Avengers Mansion and providing Sam with technical support and field information from a distance." So he'll still have something of a vital role in the story.
Marvel also plans on rolling out other comics for the other Avengers, including Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, and Scarlet Witch. There are also reports that there will be a renewed focus on Medusa, Inferno, Deathlok, and the Winter Soldier, with more than ten titles currently in the planning stages. Not all of them are solo, though. You can get a glimpse of those characters in the picture below.
Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso told EW that Superior Iron Man #1 takes Tony Stark to San Francisco with a new suit of armor and a new perspective on life.
“The Genius Bar costume is there for a reason. The newly-transformed Superior Iron Man has very ambitious plans for the city that some of its residents embrace, but not all. Like the Superior Spider-Man, Superior Iron Man is a character that’s hard to root for.”
There are a lot of big things happening over at Marvel, and it will be interesting to see how this all translates to the cinematic universe in the future.