10 Essential Captain America Comics to Read After Brave New World
Marvel “The Coming of… The Falcon!” Captain America #117 (1969) Given where Sam Wilson’s story ends up, it’s somehow fitting that he makes his debut in a story involving an imposter Captain America. Using the Cosmic Cube (known as the Tesseract in the MCU), Steve Rogers’s arch-enemy, the Red Skull, switches bodies with Cap, allowing
Given where Sam Wilson’s story ends up, it’s somehow fitting that he makes his debut in a story involving an imposter Captain America. Using the Cosmic Cube (known as the Tesseract in the MCU), Steve Rogers’s arch-enemy, the Red Skull, switches bodies with Cap, allowing him to wreak havoc in the guise of his greatest foe. While the Skull gets to live it up in New York, Rogers has to survive a beach in Haiti, where his ghastly appearance doesn’t help him with a group called the Exiles. The only hope comes from Sam Wilson, a fellow castaway who survives with the help of his trained bird, Red Wing.
Honestly, “The Coming of… The Falcon” isn’t the most auspicious debut of a great hero. Gene Colan’s action scenes are fluid as always, but his initial costume design for Falcon leaves a lot to be desired. Worse yet is Stan Lee’s dialogue, which sounds very much like a square in his fifties trying to write hip slang… because that’s exactly what he was. Still, “The Coming of… The Falcon” deserves credit for giving us Sam, even if he had a lot more growing up to do.
Given his inauspicious debut, Sam underwent a tremendous amount of development. While some ideas were worse than others (Google “Snap Wilson” if you want to be outraged), Sam really didn’t come into his own until he finally shed the sidekick status and stepped into the role of Captain America.
Written by Rick Remender and penciled by Stuart Immonen, All-New Captain America does not try to squeeze Sam into Steve Rogers’s suit. Rather, it takes head-on the resistance that Sam would face as a Black man taking on the Captain America mantle, as well as his own interpretation of the American Dream. As a result, Sam completely revitalizes the entire Captain America concept. He retains the wings of his Falcon persona and flies straight into Hydra’s base, ready to show the fascists that Captain America has renewed his fight for liberty.
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Unsurprisingly, Steve Rogers eventually returned to the role of Captain America. But he did so by joining Sam, not by replacing him. The two have continued to fight side-by-side as Captain America, except for one time—the bizarre Marvel company-wide crossover, Secret Empire.
Secret Empire reveals that Steve Rogers never was the freedom-loving kid from Brooklyn who signed up for the Super Soldier Serum because he wanted to fight bullies. Rather, he is, was, and always had been a Hydra sleeper agent, waiting for the right moment to reveal his true plan. Written by Nick Spencer and penciled by Steve McNiven, Secret Empire shows how Steve’s true nature tears the world apart.
While Secret Empire doesn’t put Steve in the best light, it does give Sam the opportunity to prove his heroism. As America slips into fascism, it’s Sam as Captain America who continues the fight for liberty, battling against his old friend and then finding a way to restore the true Steve Rogers to reality.
In the MCU, Steve only saw two people who could continue his mission as Captain America, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. Obviously, Steve passed the shield onto Sam, leaving Bucky to seek redemption in another way. But in the comics, Bucky first stood in for Steve as Captain America, before returning to the identity of the Winter Soldier. Unlike Sam, he did not get to keep on after Steve returned, a mark of lingering shame.
The Cold War storyline that ran across Captain America comics wrestles with the divisions between Steve, Bucky, and Sam, and deals with the latter’s position as Cap. Cold War pits Steve and Bucky against one another when it appears that the Winter Soldier has kidnapped a family member. Along the way, Sam considers giving up the identity and becoming the Falcon again, free from the expectations hoisted upon him. Of course, Sam decides to keep the shield at the end of the story, but the philosophical debate redefines his role as a symbol of freedom.
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“The Icon.” That’s how writer Jed MacKay describes Captain America’s role in his relaunched Avengers, which began with the 2023 storyline The Impossible City. MacKay and artist C.F. Villa take a high-concept approach to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which treats the members as godlike beings who battle metaphysical enemies aboard a sentient ship. MacKay and Villa achieve those big-idea stories with a team of heavy hitters that includes Captain Marvel (“The Star”), Thor (“The God”), and Black Panther (“The King”).
Given those cosmic stakes, Steve Rogers might seem like the best choice to be the iconic Captain America. But Captain Marvel chooses Sam instead because he’s the human Captain America, the one who understands the struggles of the common person. That humble position allows Sam to do something none of the others can accomplish, showing a level of compassion and empathy more powerful than a laser blast or hammer strike.
Of course, Marvel’s going to hype up Captain America’s latest big-screen adventure with a new comic book featuring the characters from the movie. In fact, it might be tempting to dismiss Sam Wilson, Captain America as nothing more than an advertising ploy. However, the name of writer Greg Pak on the cover quickly disabuses anyone of that assumption. A longtime veteran of Marvel Comics, Pak knows how to find new takes on well-established characters, and he gets an extra charge from working with co-writer Evan Narcisse.
Pak and Narcisse, along with pencilers Eder Messias and Valentine De Landro, send Cap to investigate a promise that’s too good to be true. When a flashy tech company creates artificial plots of land flying through the sky, they first offer them to low-income and oppressed people as a way to own property. Sam smells a rat and goes to investigate, which puts him in conflict with the Red Hulk. Even if Sam Wilson, Captain America seems superficially similar to Brave New World, rest assured that Pak, Narcisse, Messias, and De Landro will go in directions that the MCU would never imagine.
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MCU fans basically know two modes for the Hulk: Angry and Smart. But a veritable rainbow of Hulks has appeared in the comics, including the regular ol’ green Hulk, the grey-skinned mob enforcer Mr. Fixit, the terrifying Devil Hulk, and more. So when a Red Hulk showed up in the Marvel Universe, he presented a real and immediate threat, especially since he clearly wasn’t Bruce Banner.
Now, anyone who’s seen a trailer for Brave New World knows that the Red Hulk is Thunderbolt Ross, the military man who has devoted his life to taking down Banner’s rampaging alter-ego. The comic book version of that reveal occurred in the pages of a relaunched Hulk ongoing, by superstar creators Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness. Thanks to their dynamic presentation, the “Who is Red Hulk” storyline still entertains, even for those who already know the answer to the question.
The average MCU fan could be forgiven for not getting the big deal about the return of Samuel Sterns, outside of the fact that he’s played by beloved character actor Tim Blake Nelson. But we have seen Sterns on-screen before, all the way back in the little-loved second MCU movie, The Incredible Hulk (2008). In that film, Sterns presented himself as a potential ally to Banner (then portrayed by Edward Norton) but eventually revealed his true plan to steal gamma-irradiated blood. Stern’s final scene in the movie saw some of Banner’s gamma blood seeping into his forehead, an apparently unresolved wink to Sterns’s supervillain identity, the big-brained Leader.
Long before his return in Brave New World, Sterns had a comic book history. One of the Leader’s best stories occurs during the acclaimed series Immortal Hulk, written by Al Ewing. Immortal Hulk offers a radical and metaphysical approach to the Hulk, an epic story that involves all of Banner’s enemies, none more so than the Leader. We won’t reveal here how the Leader plays into the ultimate narrative of Immortal Hulk, suffice it to say that he influences the full storyline and establishes himself as one of the most compelling baddies in Marvel history.
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When it was announced that Breaking Bad standout Giancarlo Esposito was joining the cast of Brave New World, fan blogs were ablaze with theories. Would he be SHIELD agent G.W. Bridge? Would he be stuffed suit Henry Peter Gyrich? Would he be Professor Charles Xavier? Strangely, those questions only grew louder when we learned that he was playing Sidewinder, responding with a collective, “Who?”
Comic fans know that Sidewinder has been around for forty years, introduced during writer Mark Gruenwald’s legendary decade-plus run on Captain America. Sidewinder leads the Serpent Society, a collection of evil villains who perform nefarious deeds for profit and general disruption—think Spectre from classic James Bond movies. While some modern viewers might find the Serpent Society a bit corny, “Serpents Unite” shows that there’s a lot of goofy fun to the concept.
Before Sam accepted the shield, he had to consider what it meant for a Black man to be Captain America. We saw him work through those feelings in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, in which he met a previous Black Captain America, Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly). Isaiah stands as a living testament to the country’s shameful treatment of its Black citizens, one of many African-American soldiers subjected to tests of the Super Soldier Serum and then betrayed by their government.
Marvel told Isaiah’s story in much greater detail in the shocking miniseries Captain America: Truth, from 2003. Drawing inspiration from the real-world Tuskegee Experiments, writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker reveal that the U.S. government tested the Super Soldier Serum on Black GIs before giving it to scrawny Steve Rogers. The grotesque results of early versions of the Serum add a level of pathos to the storyline, which only increases the heroism of Bradley. Truth establishes Isaiah Bradley, and not Steve Rogers, as Sam’s true forerunner.
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