A review by squidbag
The Death of Captain America by Larry Hama
3.0
It is a strange thing to read a prose adaptation of a number of issues of a comic book, especially when they span events you've already read about. The "Death" of Cap was remedied by plucking him out of the timestream and bringing him back to life, and that makes it easy to forget all this complex other stuff that was going on around the hyped event that removed him, for a time, from the Marvel Universe. Larry Hama is a crisp and gifted writer (80s kids will remember him from the 'Nam, G.I. Joe comics and file cards, and some Wolverine stuff) but here, he's more like a reporter; if someone formally filed a report on the events in Captain America comics during this period as though they actually occurred, it would read like this.
I'm not sure if this would make sense to non-Marvelites. There's a truckload of backstory and without having been privy to the unfolding drama that accompanied much of that, I don't know that most readers would care about the characters in this story. Indeed, they might seem un-fleshed out if you didn't already know them - this is hard for me to know. I enjoyed this quick and engaging refresher read - like condensed comics.
I'm not sure if this would make sense to non-Marvelites. There's a truckload of backstory and without having been privy to the unfolding drama that accompanied much of that, I don't know that most readers would care about the characters in this story. Indeed, they might seem un-fleshed out if you didn't already know them - this is hard for me to know. I enjoyed this quick and engaging refresher read - like condensed comics.