A little more than ten months after Marvel killed off Captain America, the search for someone to don Steve Roger’s costume ends with the new issue, on sale tomorrow, and the winner is… his former teenage sidekick during the Second World War, Bucky. (It’s complicated: Basically, they were both frozen in ice, but found separately; Bucky was discovered by the bad guys and brainwashed into becoming an assassin, but was kept cryogenically frozen between missions, so he didn’t age much, and then his memories came back in a fight with Cap, and now he’s out ffor revenge.) The Daily News wants to make a big to-do about the fact that the new Captain America’s going to run around shooting people; whatever.
Series writer Ed Brubaker provides more detail on why Bucky got the callup in an interview with Newsarama:
“The death of Cap was not on my list of things I had to do with Captain America, but I did want to do a moment where Cap put down the shield… There was always going to be a void that needed to be filled, of some kind, whether that was going to be a death or him going to prison or him disappearing or something… but I had no clue until I wrote issue #26 or #27 that Bucky was actually going to end up taking the mantle. It didn’t occur to me that it was the next evolution of where Bucky was going. I knew all along that we would also have a redemption of Bucky storyline. So once I realized how big this story was getting, I realized I needed someone back in the costume with the shield eventually. And Bucky fit so perfectly into that.”