One year ago, Jason Latour and Nic Klein’s ongoing comic series starring Bucky Barnes titled ‘Winter Soldier’ was cancelled. However, with ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ coming to theaters the following spring, Steve Rogers’ former sidekick most likely wouldn’t be gone from the pages of Marvel Comics for very long. In fact, the hero would appear a short time afterwards in limited series ‘Winter Soldier: The Bitter March’ and in ‘All-New Invaders’ alongside his World War II teammates as part of All-New Marvel NOW. But now it appears that the House of Ideas is giving the one-time Soviet spy and assassin another shot at a solo title following the major role he’s played in the current crossover event ‘Original Sin’.
According to The A.V. Club, ‘Secret Avengers’ and ‘Iron Patriot’ writer Ales Kot will team with artist Marco Rudy for ‘Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier’. The series will find the character go from his usual status quo of espionage it the darkest corners of the world to a more cosmic arena. Editor Wil Moss described the new heights that Bucky will go to in this series:
“Bucky’s operating on an intergalactic stage now. The entire Marvel Universe is his playing field, from the depths of Limbo to the heights of Asgard, and everywhere in between. It’d be like if the James Bond movies suddenly had access to the characters and settings of all the other great film franchises. (You just know Bond wouldn’t have needed an entire fleet of X-wings to destroy the Death Star!)”
Kot is no stranger to spy comics. After dealing with the genre heavily in his Image book ‘Zero’, as well as a lighter take in ‘Secret Avengers’, the writer is looking to offer a story of what happens after all that and the sort of damage that leaves behind, all while giving a combination of Philip K. Dick sci-fi and vintage Jim Steranko spy tales. He joked that the book will be about sexy abs, but then got into the bigger details about the upcoming comic:
“Bucky Barnes has undergone self-numbing amounts of traumatic experiences. He killed for the Soviets. He killed for Americans. He had people taken away from him by rather brutal means. He had his mind wiped out. Repeatedly. To top that, he’s hyper-competent when it comes to hurting people and he barely had a childhood.
So: a lot of damage. A lot of carefully developed survival mechanisms. The thing about them, though? They might have been important once, but now—well, many of them might be no longer necessary. Bucky is entering a completely new phase of his life and it is a deeply expansive one. Shedding the old and embracing the new is the core of the character and the series – traveling across galaxies as a very capable and damaged ex-mercenary, having experiences you can’t fit into your established worldview, changing in the process.
What is to be embraced? What is to be released? And what is left of the being underneath?”
In addition to this new life for the Winter Soldier that will unfold in these pages, Kot also mentioned a number of other themes that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a series like this:
“Fluid identity and fluid gender. Many worlds theory. Feminism. Taoism. Pacifism. Nature and the systems we impost on it. Life in space. Empathy. Power unrestrained and power controlled. The Randian belief in the vampire self/20th century capitalism, what it brings, what can come after. Did I mention empathy? I know I did. I’ll mention it again. Empathy.”
That’s a whole lot to take in, but ‘Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier’ definitely sounds like an exciting ride. Will you be adding it to your pull list in October when it hits the shelves of your local comic book shop? Let us know in the comments below.
