Review by Karl Verhoven
It’s a relatively rare Captain America project that looks back to his earliest days fighting Nazis during World War II, but then Alan Gratz is the author of a string of novels set during wartime. He reveals ingenuity early with his explanation of what the Ghost Army is. They’re a comparatively small unit of specialists deployed to areas where trickery fools the Nazis into believing a much larger force is arriving. However, there’s a second ghost army, seen on the sample art, dead Nazis returning to threaten the living.
It’s down to technological jiggery-pokery, but causes a Nazi commander in a secluded castle to proclaim “This weapon will turn Nazi losses into gains! It’s almost better if our soldiers die in battle”. It’s a ludicrous statement indicative of The Ghost Army being aimed at younger readers, but frankly they deserve far better.
With Cap and Bucky trapped in Nazi occupied Central Europe, Gratz plays around a bit dropping names that might mean something to regular Marvel readers, but which generally come to nothing. Once the plot is introduced few further ideas are forthcoming, and Gratz pulls too many clichés from the Scooby-Doo catalogue, such as soldiers not noticing characters hiding behind suits of armour.
Artist Brent Schoonover doesn’t fly to the rescue either. He’s simplified his usual attractive style to an awkward form of cartooning, brightly coloured, but with stiff figures and some really flat scenes as if deliberately drawn to be two-dimensional. Further pages look deliberately drawn to feature posed action figures. For much of the book it’s not impressive art.
On the positive side, it’s nice to see the teenage Bucky given as much page time as the young Captain America, who transmits as way wiser than any eighteen year old would be, and Gratz comes good at the end when it turns out the Mordo family have a universal aspiration no matter the alternate world. These pages also feature Schoonover’s best art.
Other projects Marvel have run with Scholastic for younger readers seem to be successful, but this leaves much to be desired.
