Captain America - Volume 2: Castaway in Dimension Z - Book 2 (Marvel Now)
*Starred Review* Ed Brubaker’s espionage-noir interpretation of Marvel’s Captain America hit big and served as the impetus for the character’s 2014 cinematic sequel, The Winter Soldier. Facing the daunting task of following up the popular run, Remender (Tales of the Fear Agent, 2008) embraces a diametrically opposed vision, to thrilling effect. Taking his cue from Jack Kirby’s bonkers run from the 1970s, he plunges Captain America into a sci-fi universe of unrelenting dread. Trapped in Dimension Z, a world ruled by Nazi geneticist Arnim Zola, the hero battles to derail the megalomaniac’s plan to infect earth with his own crazed consciousness. Remender knows how to torture protagonists like few others, deepening Cap’s emotional investment by giving him an adopted son and tightening the vice by impregnating the hero with a growing seed of Zola’s personality. Remender’s tight, harrowing, and action-packed writing is coupled with Romita’s seasoned, savvy sequential storytelling, which here combines Kirby’s awe-inspiring dynamism with horrific imagery appropriate to a world of nightmare. The climax of the adventure (concluding from book 1) hammers Cap with one devastating blow after another, ensuring that, as things have seldom been so desperate for Marvel’s most dogged hero, he has seldom been more heroic. --Jesse Karp