Winter Soldier Review: Mouthguards, throat-cutting, and the hardest thing to do ...

Really, there’s only two things you need to know about my opinion of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Thing one: First—and I say this as a huge Bucky Barnes fangirl—it could’ve used about ten percent more Bucky Barnes than it actually contained. Just ten percent.

Thing two: That’s the only negative thing I can find to say about it. It is otherwise perfect. In many ways, it’s better than perfect.

Honestly, if you haven’t seen this movie yet, and you like superheroes enough to read my blog, open a new browser window right-the-hell-now and buy a ticket to see this. I’m not completely convinced yet that The Winter Soldier is better than The Avengers, but it is definitely in the same intellectual, emotional, and all-around fun weight class. This is the big-budget, high-stakes Captain America movie that you saw in your head when you read the Brubaker/Epting comics, and the one you have longed for in your heart.

One completely spoiler-free example? This movie actually gave Bucky’s story a better ending—well, a better ending-for-now, because you know it’s not over—than the comics. Yes, better than blowing up the Cosmic Cube and reappearing at Fort Lehigh. Yes, better than Steve having to convince everyone he knew that Bucky wasn’t dead again. All I have to say about this ending is stay all the way through the goddamned credits, because there is a scene you have absolutely got to see. Remember the shawarma scene in The Avengers? It’s got a sequel, only it tears your heart out instead of making you laugh maniacally. Glue your butt to the seat and watch both credits scenes. You can thank me later.

And then there’s the overall awesomeness that is the Falcon (seriously, his every scene is solid gold) … and the horror of Steve Rogers in an Apple store … and the best car chase in years … and fight scenes that work on every level … and some of the finest character work in any Marvel movie, ever …

Okay, I think I can breathe now. Time to pretend I’m actually reviewing this movie, instead of just gushing my brains out.

Because here’s the really important part I haven’t gotten around to telling you yet—this movie is a lot more than explosions and car chases and Scarlett Johansson kissing Chris Evans. This movie is after your brain, and your heart, and it’s not one you’ll forget in a hurry.

I really can’t spill too much of the plot in this review, not without spoiling some really great plot twists, so I’m going to focus on theme instead. Because it’s a big, big theme, and really the theme is a lot more important than the plot. The Winter Soldier is fundamentally a movie about tackling the biggest question in heroic fiction—the question of sacrifice. And the answer it gives, as much as it gives any kind of answer, is one that simply must be seen. It’s what elevates this movie from a standard superhero punchemup to something people will probably write dissertations about in the next couple of years. And the punching’s damn near perfect.

As we all expected, The Winter Soldier tackles some big issues on the freedom-versus-security front. Pretty much everyone who saw those trailers expected Captain America’s self-effacing, self-sacrificing 1940s ideals to clash with twenty-first-century paranoia and pragmatism … but nobody could have predicted the way that it actually drives the story. In The Winter Soldier, the central conflict is between Cap’s morality and SHIELD’s, but the sides are not exactly drawn up in the usual way. And the actual physical punching-and-kicking conflict, when it arises, encapsulates the moral conflict perfectly—and in a manner even more heartbreaking and thought-provoking than the original comics managed to do.

For years, Captain America has held the moral high ground in Marvel Comics. Thanks to his long record of unquestionably heroic service, he’s the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong; morally conflicted superheroes regularly seek him out for advice. But as a lot of readers have pointed out, giving Cap the moral high ground in a typical comic book is more problematic than it looks; he fought for years in a bloody world war, with all that entails. He’s not exactly pristine. Take that ultimate superhero bugaboo—death.

Unlike, say, Batman, there has never been any question about whether Captain America’s killed people. You can count the number of people Spider-Man’s killed on the fingers of one hand, but Captain America used to walk around with a giant death-frisbee, backed up by a teenager with a machine gun, accompanied by two guys who could light themselves on fire and a perpetually pissed-off sea king who liked ripping Nazis limb from limb and who once tried to drown all of New York City because he had a bad day. They killed a lot of people, is my point. They did things that you do not usually want your superheroes doing, and they were celebrated for it. Now, nobody who’s studied history thinks they were out of line to do those things, of course (there’s a reason Nazis are everyone’s favorite all-purpose movie villains), but it kind of blows a hole in the Captain-America-as-moral-paragon theory to remember that he did his fair share of throat-cutting with that shield.

Well, guess what? He’s not so ruined anymore. The throat-cutting’s still there—oh, my, is it ever still there—but this is not the Steve Rogers you knew.

In an early scene, after Steve complains about SHIELD turning a rescue mission into a black-ops job, Nick Fury brings up this very point—the Strategic Scientific Reserve did a lot of dirty work back in the day, so what’s Steve whining about now? But for once Steve has an answer. Like a lot of good guys doing bad things, he believed he was doing them for the sake of the greater good—so that bad things would no longer be necessary. Not so they could be institutionalized by the organization his friends founded, and certainly not so they could be repeated on a planetary scale. Maybe you don’t agree with him on that—maybe you think an organization like SHIELD is necessary, and you believe you can’t run it without spying on everyone and occasionally assassinating people who get in your way—but from that moment on, you believe that Captain America thinks it’s possible, and you understand why. And you very much want him to be right.

All of a sudden Steve Rogers has his naïveté back, and the audience really wants him to have it. By portraying Steve’s history of violence (and the surprisingly large number of people he kills on missions in this movie) as a deliberate act of self-sacrifice rather than a moral lapse, the movie places him on the moral high ground even as he’s literally trying to scrub the bloodstains out of his clothes. And by embracing that violent edge and going way past it, on a global scale and on a daily basis, SHIELD is devaluing that sacrifice. No wonder Steve is pissed. Instant conflict.

Unlike the 50 years of stories that mostly portrayed Captain America as morally perfect and absurdly claimed that he had never done anything so questionable as killing anyone, this version of Cap has taken a long walk in the darkness, and has gotten a good look at the abyss—and now he’s deliberately standing between it and his spiritual descendants. No matter where you stand on the Patriot Act, the NSA, or any other aspect of the way the world’s been run for most of my life, you understand immediately why Captain America’s doing what he’s doing, and why he considers it worth his life to do it. He is choosing, over and over again, the kind of sacrifice that defines heroism. And you’re going to bloody well root for him if you’ve got a sympathetic bone in your body. That’s the kind of character Steve Rogers is.

So whatever else happens in this movie—and especially in Cap’s inevitable conflict with his brainwashed best friend, Bucky/the Winter Soldier—that tension runs underneath it all. Can Captain America pull the world back from a brink that few people know, or care, is there? Can he do it without having to commit one last dirty deed—killing an innocent who also happens to be his oldest, closest friend? Because even if you’re not going to care about the big abstract questions of freedom and security and surveillance and control and destiny and free will and whatall, you’re going to damn well care about whether Steve, the kid from Brooklyn, has to put his best pal Bucky out of his misery. (Spoiler alert: It’s a lot of misery. I don’t think I’ve ever been so creeped out by a Winter Soldier mindwipe scene. OMG, I wanted to hide under my seat when I saw that mouthguard …) And that’s the real genius of this movie. It’s got a moral conflict on a grand scale … and it manages to play it out on the most intimate human level.

With a fairly clever twist, which I will not spoil because I like you guys way too much, the way in which Bucky is brought back from the dead and the way in which he’s used against Steve perfectly encapsulates the larger question at work. This is something a lot of movies try to do, but few if any do it as well as this one. If Steve can’t stop Bucky from fulfilling his mission, the world burns. But if Steve has to kill Bucky to stop him, Steve will burn in its place. The only way to save the free world and the soul of Steve Rogers is to save Bucky, both as he is now and as he was in Steve’s memories.

And here’s the good bit. Saving Bucky like that is just about impossible.

Did I mention there’s no Cosmic Cube in this movie? No Tesseract? I was right about a lot of my batshit-crazy predictions in the blogathon, but I was wrong about one thing: Bucky is not being controlled by anything like that particular cosmic macguffin. There’s no magical glowing box for Steve to grab and say, “Remember who you are.” If he’s going to save Bucky this time, he has to do it the hard way. And the hard way is a form of self-sacrifice that even Steve Rogers has never had to consider before. He’s not crashing a plane into an ice field now, and he’s not doing his country’s dirty work. He’s … well, I won’t spoil it. But it’s hard for anyone to pull off, and it’s harder still when it’s Steve Rogers who has to do it, and hardest of all when he has to do it while looking into the frightened, confused eyes of Bucky Barnes. (And while Bucky’s trying to bash Steve’s skull in with his metal arm. Because the plot doesn’t stop for angst.)

I’m not saying he does it. I’m not saying he doesn’t. Hell, I’m not even saying the movie actually makes clear whether he succeeds or not—something happens, but it’s kind of open to interpretation. And that’s as it should be, I think. This question is one that’s put to the audience as much as it is to Steve Rogers. Even Bucky gets a say, ultimately, in its answer, but it’s not completely up to him. It’s up to us.

Kind of heavy for a superhero movie, I know. But it’s that weight that makes this movie so very deeply worth the watching.

Okay, that and that one scene after the very end of the credits. Eeeeeeeeeee …

Winter Soldier Blogathon, Day 5: What to Read, Where to Start, and Why to Care

Wow, you made it through! Or you skipped here. Either way’s fine by me. This entry is designed to be a guide to the Winter Soldier’s appearances in the comics. I’ll start with a chronological rundown of the graphic novels in rough order of publication, and then do a short list of the best jumping-on points for this character. I’ll conclude with one last bit of fannish gushing on why you should care about this character, and a little bit of what he means to me.

Be warned—there’s a lot of stuff to cover. Here’s a picture of my personal collection of Winter Soldier graphic novels, in order:

Yes, I can lift the entire stack at once. Barely.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff. But I’ll guide you through it. And as always, I recommend used booksellers like abebooks.com and Powell’s Books over paying full price at new-book retailers. Onward!

WHAT TO READ:

What to read: This.

For once, Marvel has made your job easy. If you want to get started on the world of Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier and you don’t want to do any hunting, there’s a terrific new hardcover edition of the complete Winter Soldier storyline, put out just in time for the movie. It’s $34.99, and worth every penny. (If that seems pricey for one graphic novel, note that it’s got thirteen issues in it—the equivalent of two trade paperbacks, either of which would retail for about $20. So even in hardcover, it’s a bit of a cost savings.) There’s one issue missing from this book, but it was a one-off “event story” that took place in an alternate universe and had absolutely nothing to do with the Winter Soldier storyline, which I assume is why it’s been omitted. The book does not suffer in its absence. Don’t worry about it.

If you’d rather go the cheaper route, Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Winter Soldier storyline are available in used paperback form, though they appear to be out of print.

If you like that story and want to keep reading, here’s a short rundown of later volumes in the series:

3 and 4. Red Menace: Crossbones returns, and Steve and Bucky end up in London.

5. Civil War. Cap joins the resistance to the Superhuman Registration Act. Bucky does some skullduggery for Nick Fury. Contains Winter Soldier: Winter Kills, a beautiful one-shot special about how Bucky spends his Christmas. Hint: it involves violence and awkward team-ups with teen superheroes.

6, 7, and 8. The Death of Captain America, vols. 1-3 (The Death of Captain America / The Burden of Dreams / The Man Who Bought America). This three-volume saga covers it all, from Steve’s assassination to the hunt for his killers to Bucky’s transition to life as the new Captain America. Some of the knottiest plotting in all of Ed Brubaker’s run. I cannot summarize this, but if you really like twisty plots and a million reversals per chapter, this is going to be your crack.

9. The Man With No Face. Bucky-Cap faces the vengeful survivor of one of his nastiest Winter Soldier missions. Guest-starring the Sub-Mariner, who adds a lot of comic relief.

Namor reacts to Bucky and Natasha having a moment. Thanks a lot, Namor.

10. Road to Reborn. A more or less random collection of stories, collecting a series of clues leading up to …

11. Captain America: Reborn. Guess what? Steve’s not actually dead! There’s time travel and mad science and oh so much crazy. It’s a fun story, though.

12. Two Americas. Steve insists that Bucky keep the Captain America identity, so Bucky and the Falcon go hunt down an insane doppelganger of Steve Rogers who escaped during a previous story. Imagine Bucky and the Falcon fighting domestic terrorists in rural Idaho. Yeah, it’s like that.

13. No Escape. Baron Zemo, the grandson of the World War II villain who nearly killed Cap and Bucky at the end of the war, decides to avenge his grandfather’s honor and kill Bucky-Cap off. He eventually settles for second prize …

14. The Trial of Captain America. Once Zemo has exposed Bucky’s past as the Winter Soldier, Bucky goes on trial for his decades of Cold War crimes. Meanwhile, the Red Skull’s daughter, Sin, proclaims herself the new Red Skull and goes on a rampage. Bucky must decide whether being Captain America means a) going along with due process or b) stopping a supervillain from blowing up the Statue of Liberty. Did I mention Bucky has poor impulse control?

15. Prisoner of War. Bucky gets off on the U.S. charges, but the Russians demand extradition. Bucky goes to the gulag and gets thrown into a series of cage matches, which turn out to have a motive even more sinister than bad guys just wanting to watch an American superhero fight for his life. The Winter Soldier’s legacy just won’t leave Bucky alone. Psychological games ensue. Meanwhile, Steve and Natasha try to prove Bucky’s innocence. Espionage hijinks ensue.

16. Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes. After Bucky “died” during the not-very-good Fear Itself crossover, the monthly Captain America comic became Captain America and Bucky for a while. The first storyline, “The Life Story of Bucky Barnes”, presents a series of untold tales from Bucky’s past—including his childhood before he met Steve Rogers, a couple of wartime adventures, and a Winter Soldier tale focusing on his romance with the Black Widow. I have not included the next volume of Captain America and Bucky in this list because Bucky Barnes isn’t actually in it. Long story. After that the title became Captain America and Hawkeye, and then fizzled out. This volume is the only one relevant to this timeline.

17. Winter Soldier: The Longest Winter. With Steve finally back in the Captain America costume (and a new Captain America monthly title), Bucky sets off to clean up a few Winter Soldier-related messes. Natasha comes along for the fun and because somebody has to stop Bucky from leading with his face. Romance and a machine-gun-toting gorilla ensue. Also, Bucky meets Doctor Doom and they get along as well as you’d expect. Ha.

18. Winter Soldier: Broken Arrow. A Soviet sleeper agent, trained long ago by the Winter Soldier, is out to destroy the world that replaced his. A key part of his plan involves getting the Black Widow on his side, in more ways than one. Creepy and action-packed, with great twists.

19. Winter Soldier: Black Widow Hunt. The saga of the sleeper agent continues, as our heroes discover some nasty parts of that plan that I won’t spill here. Bucky fights Hawkeye, Wolverine, Daredevil, Cap, and the Black Widow. There’s really an unreasonable amount of fighting in this book. Oh, and it also rips my heart out and crushes it before my eyes, because … well, you should know by now.

20. Winter Soldier: The Electric Ghost. With the Black Widow out of his life, Bucky sets about picking up the pieces of another old mission—one that killed a SHIELD agent and left a little girl named Tesla Tarasova orphaned. Tesla has grown up into the rather frightening Electric Ghost, who can get into Bucky’s head like no one else. This storyline is the only one on this list that Ed Brubaker didn’t write, and it’s also one of the weakest.

Winter Soldier was canceled after the Electric Ghost storyline, so since then it’s just been individual comics not yet collected in trade form. If you want to check them out, there are two series:

21. All-New Invaders. This comic, written by James Robinson (a man who knows his World War II heroes) is a big team-up between Captain America, the original Human Torch, the Winter Soldier, and Namor the Sub-Mariner, among others. Lots of World War II flashbacks and some really good Band of Brothers-style camaraderie in a group of modern heroes whose bond goes all the way back to the 1940s. Right now the plot involves the alien Kree kidnapping Namor for plotty reasons and Namor’s old war buddies invading the Kree homeworld to get him back—largely because Namor’s such a jerk to most people that nobody else wants to rescue him.

22. Winter Soldier: The Bitter March. I wasn’t impressed with the first issue of The Bitter March, written by Rick Remender, but the second has piqued my interest. The story follows a lone SHIELD agent, Ran Shen, trying to smuggle a couple of ex-Nazi scientists out of eastern Europe  in the 1960s so SHIELD can have their magic formula. Chasing Shen is a bunch of Hydra goons and the Winter Soldier. The first issue focused mostly on Shen, and Bucky was basically playing the Terminator, coming after him over and over again. The second issue, however, got into the Winter Soldier’s head a bit more; it’s starting to look like Bucky is trying to retake control of his own brain, and that’s not going to end well for anyone. Seems like things are heating up!

WHERE TO START:
I’ll make this short and sweet. Find the quote that sounds like you and read the answer:

“I want to know what’s going on when I watch the movie, but I only want to read one book.”
Read the Winter Soldier hardcover, or its two trade-paperback equivalents. That’s you sorted.

Pictured: You, sorted.

“I want the best Bucky-Cap storyline.”
Read The Man With No Face. Action, angst, and a pretty good mystery. This is good for the Bucky-Natasha shippers, too.

Oh, look, the cover is a Bucky fashion show!

“I want a little bit of everything—a sampling of the character from different periods in his life.”
Read The Life Story of Bucky Barnes. It’s your one-stop shop.

Also, there's interior art by Chris Samnee. You want that.

“I want the most kickass Winter Soldier action you’ve got.”
Read Winter Soldier: The Longest Winter. Then keep reading if you like what you see.

Including a gorilla with a machine gun. And a jetpack.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
Aside from the fact that I obviously adore this character and these storylines, it’s worth pointing out why I adore them. The Winter Soldier storyline was, at the time, one of the most complex ever to appear in mainstream superhero comics—both in terms of plot twists and in terms of its characters’ emotional arcs. It set the pattern for a lot of the really terrific stories that have come out of the Big Two—especially Marvel—in the last decade. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that Winter Soldier gave a lot of people permission to break the rules of comics—as long as they produced exceptional stories in doing so. At the same time, it set the bar pretty high. As I said at the beginning of this series, this is one of only two comic books that I hand people in order to make them cry. Its cinematic scope and the neverending gut-punch of its emotional impact cannot be understated.

You will spend the entire storyline doing this. I am not kidding even a little bit.

Don’t believe me? Look at this incredibly short summary:

In Winter Soldier, Captain America finds out that his long-dead kid sidekick, Bucky, is actually a zombie cyborg assassin working for the Russians. Fight scenes and angst ensue.

Pretty much what I thought would happen when I saw this.

Does that sound remotely interesting? No. In fact, it sounds completely batshit insane. I’ve quoted this summary to non-geeks and gotten completely baffled looks. And yet that’s the bare bones of this storyline. What makes it work—what made me and a million other fans care about it—is the way in which that batshit-crazy story was told. This book makes you care about one of the permanent corpses so much that even the most rule-conscious nerd can be persuaded not to care about the rules. Screw Steve Rogers’ angsty motivation and screw the necessity of conflict; by the end of this book, you want Bucky to live and be happy, no matter what it takes. And yet we’re talking about Bucky the dead kid sidekick, butt of a thousand nerd jokes. And yet, when Steve Rogers came back from the dead in 2011, there was significant fan outcry against killing Bucky off because so many people liked Bucky-Cap better than Original Cap. He had earned their allegiance. Nerds almost never shift their loyalties like that—but this storyline got them to do it.

I own the T-shirt of this.
I MADE the T-shirt of this. And people bought it.

On paper, this story should never work. And yet it did, and it still does, and it’s inspired a lot of great work from a lot of other writers.

I promised myself when I started this series that I wouldn’t talk about my most personal reason for being a diehard Winter Soldier fan, and I won’t. It’s not something you need to hear, especially on a blog whose audience includes children, and in any case I probably won’t be able to talk about it in public for a while yet, if ever. But I will say this: For a lot of fans, especially younger ones (by which I mean under the age of 35), there’s something in the saga of Bucky Barnes that resonates. If you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t escape some horrible piece of your past, he’s a character for you. If you’ve ever been expected to measure up to an impossible standard, he’s a character for you. If you’ve ever had to sit and wrestle with your demons in silence because, for one reason or another, you just couldn’t speak up about them to anyone—here’s Bucky Barnes.

This page probably sums up James Buchanan Barnes better than any other.

He’ll match you ghost for ghost, burden for burden, demon for demon, and he’ll still get up again the next morning. He’ll make fun of himself sometimes, and he’ll play the hardened cynic, even though he’s really got a squishy romantic heart that’s far too close to his brittle surface.

Bucky and Natasha go for a walk in the rain. Squishy romanticism ensues.

He’ll never be the hero Steve Rogers is, and he’ll never live up to Captain America’s example, and he knows both those things—but he usually has no idea how deeply he inspires the man he admires most.

Steve works on his eulogy for Bucky, just before finding out Bucky's not dead.

“This is what it is to be human,” Spider Robinson once wrote: “to persist.”

Bucky Barnes persists. Half man and half machine, half monster and half hero, he is one of the most human characters in modern comics. So here’s hoping his movie turns out half as good as it looks.

And hey, would it kill anyone to get Natasha back in the book? Come on!

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 22

This chapter was unusually difficult to write, for a fairly stupid reason.

When I began writing stories as a child, I was usually pretty good at what I now call “character work.” I had a pretty good sense of how people felt and how they would react to the events of the story. Vividly realized characters were my forte, beginning with a large cast of imaginary friends who followed me to school and amused me by making faces behind any teachers who dared to bore me (which, sadly, was most of them).

But I wasn’t any good at complicated plots. I enjoyed reading them—I just didn’t have the sort of brain that naturally came up with them. It’s why I didn’t gravitate toward writing mysteries or thrillers. While I work very hard on my plots—a lack of natural talent is no excuse for mediocrity—it is work in a way that character work really isn’t. And every once in a while, I hit a complicated bit of plotting or design that just knocks me flat, because it really belongs in another genre.

This is a very long way of saying that I have a couple of consultants helping me design my deathtraps.

The design of Trevor’s prison—the tiger cage inside the shipping container—was the work of John Konecsni, author of the very complex and plotty A Pius Man, among other tales. It’s really one of the better trap designs I’ve used, given the resources I handed him and the needs of the project. Cobalt’s impromptu prison had to be something he could construct out of commonly available materials, for starters—when you’re trapping superpowered kids, you have to assume that part of the trap will get trashed from time to time, so you’ve got to make sure you can replace any damaged elements. The trap also had to be modular; because, as he says, he’s selling the kids to the highest bidder, he needs the ability to put kids in and take kids out without interacting with them too much, and also keep them from working together too easily.

And if you’re not impressed, just wait a couple of weeks; you haven’t seen the entire trap yet. Trevor will find out more about his prison when he actually has to get out of it. Remember, there’s a whole world outside that shipping container that could have anything in it …

This chapter also marks the point where Trevor finally starts to revise the way he thinks and acts. While I never intended Masks to be a navel-gazing sort of story, the changes in Trevor’s and Rae’s characters are a major driving force, and some of Trevor’s changes are particularly intentional. He’s going to work his way back to being more of a traditional superhero, and that process starts here, locked in a cage next to an angry werewolf. After all, what’s the point of self-examination if it doesn’t come with face-clawing?

Random note: if you’ve never seen Otter Pops, you can find out more about them here. I knew Cobalt wasn’t stupid enough to give Trevor anything hard to work with, so that meant his water couldn’t come in anything made of glass, metal, or rigid plastic. An IV line would be too much trouble, and for reasons you’ll see later, Cobalt can’t come throw a bucket of water over the cages on a regular basis. Otter Pops were my solution. And for the record, Sir Isaac Lime was my favorite flavor, so there.

This week’s soundtrack is (what else?) Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 19

Well, what do you guys think of this one, huh? Tell me I surprised you at least a little. Go on, tell me. No, seriously, I’ll cry otherwise.

Oh, all right. This chapter is one of those points where the differences between Trevor’s point of view and Rae’s become really apparent. Trevor’s actions in the previous chapter made perfect sense to him, but to Rae they were absolutely crazy. And of course the explanation only makes the whole situation worse.

I enjoyed bending genres in this chapter. I deliberately wrote Rae creeping through the tunnels as if she were in a horror movie. One of the things that always intrigued me about superhero comics is the way they combined genres in utterly insane ways. They’d have team-ups between kung fu masters and wizards and secret agents and vampires and space aliens and cowboys and time travelers and God knows whatall else. You never knew when your favorite superhero would find himself in the middle of a horror movie, or a spy thriller, or a cosmic odyssey. And the superheroes mostly take it for granted that these things happen. So the horror overtones in this chapter were my way of reminding everyone that in a book with a ghost cowboy, a teleporting super-commando, a were-tiger and the last son of a dying planet all running around, anything can happen. And it usually does.

Moving on!

I know I’m going to get asked about this, so I’ll mention it now: the “artist’s impression” Rae mentions was planted waaaaayyy back in Chapter 5, when Rae was griping about her bad press. Yeah, I plan that far back. Anything can happen!

Once again, the conflict in this chapter comes down to whom you believe. We’ve seen in Trevor’s flashbacks that he’s haunted by the train bombing, but do we believe his version of events—that he screwed up—or Rae’s—that he’s a murderous terrorist? And do we believe Rae’s story about finding the Peregrine costume in a box, or do we think she had something to do with Jude’s disappearance? Don’t worry, we’ll get into all these issues in later chapters.

The Masked Rider makes another appearance in this chapter, but you might notice the change in Rae’s behavior—for the first time, instead of hiding from him, she tries to chase him down. I think this is the first scene where we see how reckless Rae’s capable of being. We know she’s scared of the Rider, but that doesn’t matter when someone she loves is at stake. She’s willing to literally chase after the angel of death. She doesn’t do the greatest job of it—there’s no way she’s going to catch that horse on foot—but this is a major turning point for Rae, and you’ll see how it affects her as we move into the last third of the book. This won’t be the last time she does something crazy because she’s run out of non-crazy options.

The next chapter gave me an interesting bit of trouble. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but the chapters in Masks alternate points of view—Rae gets all the odd chapters and Trevor gets all the even ones. Trevor’s just been kidnapped by Cobalt, so the next chapter would logically show what happens to people after Cobalt takes them. But … well, what you see isn’t always what you get, okay? Just come back next Wednesday for a guest star you won’t forget …

This week’s soundtrack is “Reason to Breathe” by Acacia Sears. (Personally, I prefer the recording on her album, "Dialtones", but I couldn't embed it here.) Something about this song speaks to the misunderstanding between Rae and Trevor: “Couldn’t we please just try this again from hello? / Take back the history, make believe we just didn’t know …” 

Reason to Breathe

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 16

Moon’s background was one of the surprises waiting for me as I wrote this book. He and Golem were originally created as one-off characters for the background of a scene with a lot of other superpowered kids, but when I rewrote the plot to set much of the action in the tunnels, the two of them emerged as the best candidates for Trevor’s “neighbors,” and quickly developed a shared backstory that let me explore this underground market for young metahumans.

The idea for black-market exploitation of kids with powers came originally from a series of articles I’d read over the years about street children in Los Angeles and other cities—how many of them are fleeing bad home situations, and many end up in even worse states of exploitation. With all the different sources of superpowers floating around the Masks universe (mad science, magic, and more), and considering the large number of comic books over the years about teenagers who unexpectedly sprout superpowers, I reasoned that there had to be some kids who ended up with powers that they didn’t want and/or couldn’t deal with. I’ve known kids who were kicked out of their homes for changing or rejecting their religion, dating the wrong person (or not dating the right person), or doing any of a hundred other things most people would think of as relatively harmless. What would life be like for those kids if their families found out they had superpowers? Particularly if those superpowers got in the way of the lives those families wanted for their kids?

If your parents can’t handle a kid who cross-dresses, how will they deal with a shapeshifter? If they’ve got their hopes pinned on sending you to med school at Harvard, what will they do if you develop bulletproof skin and decide to become a professional superhero? What if you have the ability to read minds, and you find out a family secret? It’s not hard to imagine a kid with inconvenient powers ending up on the street, and after that, you’ve got all the usual dangers for runaway kids, with a new one added on—people who either fear your powers or want to use them for their own ends. It made sense that kids who couldn’t hide their powers (like being made out of rock) would have the hardest time, and be most vulnerable to people like Dr. Maligno.

This provided an interesting opportunity for non-powered masks like Trevor, of course. It’s easy for the guy with no obvious powers and/or reputation to sneak around and get the drop on the bad guys while they’re focusing on his superpowered friends. I’ve lost count of the number of comic-book stories I’ve read where low-powered heroes like Captain America, Daredevil, or Batman flattened big, powerful villains who were too busy pounding the stuffing out of Iron Man or Superman to think about the “little” guys. A lot of the early Avengers stories did this with Captain America in particular—some bad guy would capture all the “important” heroes and assume that anybody could deal with a “glorified acrobat” like Cap. Those stories pretty much always ended with Cap breaking someone’s jaw, and they got me thinking about what it must have been like to be one of the high-powered guys trapped in a stasis tube or tied to a nuclear missile. Were they embarrassed to have a mere mortal saving their skins? Were they jealous that the normal guys didn’t have to deal with so much scrutiny? Wasn’t the ability to be constantly underestimated sort of a power all by itself?

I think this really came to a head when I read a story about Captain America and Iron Man, set shortly after Cap thawed out of the iceberg. Cap was still getting his bearings in modern New York (the story began with him staring in horror at a plaque where Ebbets Field used to be—apparently he was a big Dodger fan), and Iron Man spent the first half of the story pitying the guy and worrying about how he must “feel like a caveman”, so far out of his native time. When a bunch of giant killer robots attacked, Iron Man, worried about his vulnerable colleague, ordered Cap to “stay back and protect the civilians”. Then he soared off to take on the bad guys all by himself, which didn’t work out so well—he got completely thrashed and thrown at an oncoming bus. Just as he was about to make scrap metal out of armor, bus, and helpless passengers, a familiar striped shield spun into frame. Thanks to the shield’s unique impact-absorbing properties, one SP-TANG later, we ended up with a dented bus and a dented superhero, but no casualties. “The civilians are okay,” Cap deadpanned as Iron Man picked himself up.  

Much as I loved that story and rooted for the timelost hero to mop the town with his much more powerful foes, I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Iron Man. The world was supposed to belong to guys like him, and instead it belonged to the underdogs, because that made a better story. So it made sense that Trevor, growing up in a world like this, would feel responsible for people who were much more powerful than he, and feel guilty when he failed to protect them. It’s the kind of upside-down mentality that only makes sense if you grow up in a world where the bad guys attack the big guns first … but that’s Trevor for you.

Oh, and then we have Trevor's guesses about Rae's real name! Like Rae's speculations in Chapter 7, these are all references to big-name superheroes, or at least as big-name as female heroes get. "Cassie" is Cassandra Sandsmark, known to Teen Titans fans as Wonder Girl and (for a while) a girlfriend of Tim Drake. "Jean" is, of course, Jean Grey, the X-Men character who went by about a dozen codenames over the years (including Marvel Girl, Phoenix, Dark Phoenix and--off and on--just "Jean Grey"). And "Stephanie" is Stephanie Brown, the only female Robin in the major Batman canon (no, I don't count Carrie Kelley from The Dark Knight Returns, since I think that's been retconned or Elsworldsed away) and yet another girlfriend of Tim Drake. It was a little harder coming up with girl-hero names, but I persevered.

This week’s track, more or less randomly selected off my MASKS playlist, is Gordon Lightfoot’s “Ordinary Man,” for all the wandering mere-mortal heroes out there.