CAPTAIN AMERICA, Annual 9 (Thomas / Valentino, et al; Marvel, 1990)
Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-)read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review / memory / whatever. Earlier installments live here.
(Box05): One of the first issues that sent me into this 34-year comics collecting spiral, its Iron Man blasting Cap cover drawing nine-year-old me to the stand at The Grocery Bag in Millersburg, OH, one of two local 90s gateways to the comics world but the only one that had Smurf Ice Cream (vanilla colored blue with Smurf blood or something) and an omnipresent smell of wet cardboard (unrelated to Smurf ice cream, probably) wafting about but the comic itself, revisited after 33 years: if CIVIL WAR was an entertaining Cap-v-Iron Man throwdown, it's got nothing on TERMINUS FACTOR's volcano-creature tainted fish-fry-laden Cap-v-Iron fisticuffs in a small mountain town: did the first chapter of CIVIL WAR end with an angry, red-eyed, tainted-fish-infected bear striking a pre-Image Jim Valentino-drawn pose after killing a deer while an Anti-Monitor lookalike hovered overhead? I think not. By virtue of a pre-COCAINE BEAR cocaine bear, it wins. Millar, eat your heart out.
The two other stories – a WWII-flashback by Randall Frenz and a pre-Spidey Mark Bagley and a prelude to the NOMAD limited series (which ends with Jack Monroe assuming the mullet and eye-dilation sunglasses look that would define the EXTREME nineties) – are, as per most annuals, largely forgettable – following tainted-fish Cap-Iron Man throwdown is nothing if not an unenviable task but it does bring up a point: I've long been dismayed that annuals were (and are) treated as an afterthought, a fifth-week stuffing of second-rate material to fill space, a lost opportunity. Feels like every approach has been tried – company-wide crossovers in the nineties, but even those were second-rate (BLOODLINES, anyone?), the "story behind the story" approach (Superboy Prime punched a wall and reanimated Jason Todd) in the naughties, etc etc – but nothing ever felt right.
Clearly, the only solution is more tainted-fish-fry cocaine bears.