Captain America: Man Out of Time by Mark Waid

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Former Captain America writer Mark Waid retells the story of Captain America freezing in time, only more in line with the movies, he imagines Cap awakening in the 21st Century rather than the 1960s.

The book has some good stuff in it to be sure. Cap would have a fair amount of serious culture shock and Waid captures that in a way that was better than the movies.

Waid made the decision to make this book a character piece and have nearly all of the action and supervillain fighting occurring off panel. The biggest villain to play any role is Kang the Conqueror.

Issue 1 is essentially a very long conversation between Captain America and Bucky about what they'll do after the war. It's a somewhat tedious issue and it leads into Issue 2 where Captain America is discovered in the late 1990s and early 21st century.

I should add that the artist preserved one of the silliest inconsistencies in Avengers #4 where Cap originally joined the Silver Age (also included in this volume.) In Avengers #4, in the scene in which Bucky dies and Cap plunges into the Ocean they're dressed in Army Khakis. However, Captain America wakes up in his uniform with his shield. Kirby got away with it because there was about a page flashback of Cap and Bucky. It doesn't work out as well in this one since he spends an entire issue in Khakis so the fact that we next see him as Captain America looks really inconsistent.

Issue 2 focuses on the culture shock at the future and Waid does his best work here though at times this goes over the top where Captain America almost seems Tick-like. It is however realistic to imagine him somewhat awestruck and thrown off balance.

The rest of the book is somewhat downhill. In Issue 3, he's ready to go home using time travel and pledges to save Bucky and live as a hobo as not to interfere with space time. Tony Stark gives a great speech on how the 21st Century is great and how much better things are than in the 1940s which is good because President Obama says Cap can't travel in time due to the uknown risk.

In Issue 4, we get (to quote Green Arrow from Kingdom Come), the Democratic response to Tony Stark's optomism from dying retired general Jacob Simon ( a play on Cap creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon) who complains that Martin Luther King was shot and no pitchers actually bat for themselves anymore. I'm not certain which angered the general more or why he hasn't heard of the National League in which pitchers do bat for themselves.

I won't write too much about the rest other than to say, it was most underwhelming and unsatisfying. Captain America: Man Out of Time delves into the issue of which is better: now or the 1940s and how Cap views whether the world has gotten better and doesn't really answer the question in a satisfactory way. It's an angst driven story without enough fuel to lift off and in many ways it betrays the Captain America character.

Sure, I could see Captain America feeling homesick for the 1940s but being willing to use time travel to re-insert himself into the timeline and having to be told not to is a stretch. Cap is often whiny and brooding in this book which is just not the Cap we know.

To be fair, those things were a small part of Cap's character into the Silver Age but he would throw himself into helping others and fighting evil. By de-emphasizing action, Waid gave us a far more one dimensional portrayal.

And the idea of whether things were better in the 1940s or worse has little to do with who Captain America is. The point of Captain America has never been that things were better in the 1940s. Rather, Cap embodied the best of that generation and a part of that era that we lost. That gets lost in the debate that's set up in this story.

This is the first Mark Waid story I've read where the art is the best part of the book. Overall, disappointing.



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