Captain America is a character who continues to pose problems for writers.  Take him out of a very conventional action story, most creators seem to struggle to find anything to do with him.  Regardless of political sympathies, most people would seem to agree that the Marvel Knights relaunch of the monthly title has not worked out terribly well.

Bruce Jones and Steve Rude are the latest creators to take a stab.  What Price Glory? is a four-issue miniseries shipping weekly, which is an interesting scheduling decision in itself.  It's somewhat more successful than the regular title, but still has its difficulties.

One central problem with Captain America is that the character is flawless, and has such a strong moral compass that it's very hard to manufacture credible situations where he's called upon to make any sort of policy decision on how he should react.  Faced with any situation, he instantly knows what's morally right, and promptly does it.  Laudable as this may be, it does not make for a very interesting character.  It's fine for action stories (where he isn't called upon to do anything more than recognise a villain and then stop him), but in other circumstances the character proves difficult to work with.

Jones' approach is, if anything, to exaggerate these tendencies.  Moral conflicts and complexity are left to the supporting cast.  His Captain America is impossibly perfect.  He likes justice, hates injustice, and remains impeccably calm and nice at all times.  When called upon to fight, he trounces the opponent without breaking a sweat before immediately returning to his default behaviour.  The model seems to be the soft-spoken martial arts hero who looks unimposing until he starts performing ludicrous feats of athleticism.  The slight twist is that while Jones' Cap is genuinely perfect, he seems self-aware about it, taking quiet amusement in toying with the bad guys by playing up to his persona.

It's a nice take on the character, but it doesn't quite solve the central problem: this man has no doubts about anything, and consequently runs short of character conflict.  Jones isn't really trying to solve the problem, so much as turn it to his advantage by using it to make Cap cool.  But it reads oddly to have a character like this wandering around in a subplot where his paralysed friend begs him to have sex with his wife.  There's a strange disparity between the main character and the rest of the plot.  That seems deliberate, but I'm not clear how Jones is going to get this to work as a story.

Steve Rude's art has its usual retro quality, although it's not as pronounced as it sometimes is.  While I admire the high quality of Rude's storytelling, I generally find the style off-putting - I just don't see the point of doing obvious emulations of the past, in most contexts.  However, it works here.  The ridiculously perfect lead character suits a style that echoes a more innocent age, and the air of artificiality is equally at home with Cap.

Yes, there are certainly problems with this issue.  Principally, there's a creaky old mob kidnap plot, which isn't particularly exciting.  But Jones and Rude come a lot closer than most to making the character work, by quietly stressing the oddity of the man and making it a virtue. 

Rating: B

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