[brydeemer]

What did you think of the series?

Listen here

Bry

[mguy1977]

Waiting very patiently for tpb of this series. Bry I believe the OGN route would be the way to go for projects like this 120 to 144 pages in the same manner as the Jonah Hex OGN that is coming out soon. It is not mega popular but does have a fanbase that needs attention for the good stuff.

Matthew

[max headroom]

Thought it was a solid series and featured some of Steve Epting's best work as an artist.

Had a small issue with Cap knowing Pearl Harbor was coming, but if he did, then that would mess with some of the real history, but I would think Cap has to carry some guilt on not making the right call and people were massacred.

Nice Twilight Zone-ish finish at the end too.

[max headroom]

To disagree with our fine Geeks on this, why can't this be a gateway series for more Golden Age goodness?

We now have established the pre-WWII Marvel Universe, now the seeds from this series can take root with an emphasis on those characters. This is the first layer potentially many more stories and I think in order to establish this, they would need to use the Captain America/Namor/Human Torch as the foundation.

We now know who Angel is, so he can be the base for the next layer.

[Magneto_Guevara]

Agree pretty much exactly with everything you guys said in this episode. Overall it was about a 3.5 for me, too. GREAT art all throughout; maybe Epting's best ever. The script to each issue was always solid, but, yeah, there's still a general sense of disappointment about what the series could have been. I remember exactly going through the process that Bryan recounted: at about issue 3, starting to worry that the Cap stuff was going to take over the series; then issue 4 (5?) came, and I thought "OK, well maybe this is IT for the Cap stuff and they just had to get it all out of the way at once"; and then after that point we barely got anything in the series that wasn't connected to the formation of the Invaders. It was all great stuff, but I really wanted something different. I like WWII stuff and old Cap stuff, but we've seen it all already so many times. Yes, all that stuff is BIG and important, but personally I'd rather have had a few issues of someone like the Ferret busting thugs on the domestic front, without any mention of Nazis.

Maybe the pre-Cap Marvel heroes just aren't worth it, monetarily or creatively. Or, at least, maybe the right writer hasn't come along to rekindle them. Maybe Brubaker isn't the guy. Generic WWII stuff, Cap-worship, and cookie-cutter cameos of FDR--sure, he can do that, but what writer can't? Characters like the original Angel, the Ferret and co.--what writer CAN do them? No one, at least not yet. Maybe the pre-Cap material is sort of like how the '50s Batman stuff was before Morrison came along and reinvigorated those concepts. Yeah, Morrison's Batman isn't for everybody, but for the longest time the sci-fi Batman stuff was verboten--until Morrison came along and thought of creative ways to reuse that material. I think it was the same with the DC Golden Age for a while (post-Roy Thomas in the early '80s) until James Robinson did what he did in the '90s. The Marvel Golden Age just hasn't found its reinvigorating/reinventing writer yet.

As far as the Cap-knowing-about-Pearl-Harbor thing...heh...I would think more of the guilt would be on the US govt. I mean, it depends on how much stock you want to put into "conspiracy theories"...though at this point I think the facts show that it's pretty likely that some people in the US govt (in the real world) knew that Japan was going to attack. Did they know the exact time and location of the attack beforehand? Impossible to say, and it's probably unfair to assign blame (certainly not as much blame as the attackers themselves deserve, y'know?). At least (in the Marvel U) some of the superheroes tried to stop the attack. Personally, I think the subject matter here is too big to really fit into the focus or parameters of Marvels Project.

[the_standard]

I think some of the content you guys where hoping this series could have been,was more in the style of "The Twelve" its too bad that series has not been completed. Recently There was a Twelve special issue out Written and Drawn by series Artist Chris Weston, it took place in WW2 alot of interaction with Cap and was pretty good, check it out.

[spid]

I sort of disagree with what the guys were saying. I was not really looking for more obscure Marvel characters for Brubaker to play with. These guys are not really a draw for me so I do not need more exploration into what happens to them. I would have liked to see more of the government story behind the creation of Cap. The conspiracy angle was not as involved in the overall plot that I thought when the series was solicited. The golden age stuff is something I could do without.

Marvel does seem to be following the Cap story arc through history with The Patriot mini that is coming out.