"And with a gun! Now I know you're not the athletes who were scheduled to appear!" - Captain America

(The chemical gas wasn't enough of a giveaway??)

I'm using this story to just get my feet wet and get a running start for some longer reviews. I don't have much to say about this one. It wasn't a bad read - it just wasn't all that entertaining either. The highpoint was the four panels where Rick took on two assassins (one of them armed) all by his lonesome. Zemo is really recruiting from the bottom of the barrel down there in South America.

I'm pretty surprised that Kirby and Lee would go with a second consecutive story in which Cap fights a group of nondescript non-superpowered foes who all wear the same costume of a uniform color. Pretty much the only visual difference between Zemo's assassins and Bull's gang from last month is that the assassins are green instead of purple. I guess this all comes down to the perceived need to show Cap in athletic action against multiple foes simultaneously, and you're not going to design a bunch of different costumes in such a case. But I'm ready for something different for Cap next month. Waiting for the Skull.

Is it coincidence that Zemo's assassins dress in the same colors as Cap's hired stunt athletes? I'm guessing this is part of Zemo's plan - he spied on Cap with his scanner and then made his assassins wear those colors accordingly.

There aren't many scanworthy illos. Here's a good rendering of Cap's face on the splash:

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...which is ironic because it's not Cap. It's one of Zemo's assassins posing as Cap during a training session. On that splash, the other assassins have no pupils, reminding me of X-Men Masterworks V1. I don't know whether or not these splash assassins have pupils in the original floppy. They look like robots in this illo because of those eyes.

So Cap has now been impersonated by: the Acrobat, the Chameleon, and Zemo's assassin. Step right up and be the first on your block.

Here's the other illo I liked.

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I enjoyed seeing Zemo blast his own scanner screen.

We learn that Cap can control the direction of his shield's flight even after it leaves his hand. He throws a curve with it, which is fairly cool. How about a changeup? Now that would fake someone out. It would be so awesome for Cap to nail someone with a slow throw when they froze in place because they thought they didn't have time to dodge what had looked like a hard throw. I can see Zemo spluttering after being humiliated by that one.


"Now we're getting off focus." - the Elder Son of Storytime