Review by Ian Keogh

For the vast majority of comics since his 1960s revival Captain America has been treated as a superhero, with military activities restricted to wartime flashbacks. Our Secret Wars takes the opposite route. It’s a continuity implant, but on a massively extended scale. Captain America’s modern day origin has him frozen in ice beneath the sea since World War II ended and rescued by the Avengers, whom he subsequently joined, becoming a team mainstay. Chip Zdarsky has it that this didn’t occur immediately between panels as previously related. Instead Steve Rogers spent some time adjusting to the almost twenty years time had moved on without him. Zdarksy updates this from the 1960s to a more recent era when smartphones have just been introduced.

So what did Captain America do? Well, it turns out he went to Latveria on a covert rescue mission and ended up confronting Doctor Doom.

On other projects Zdarsky’s found new things to say about very old characters, and that’s evident in Our Secret Wars, from the neat trick of how Mr. Fantastic remains anonymous in public, through a more sympathetic military role for General Thaddeus Ross to the idea of Captain America being a subordinate on the mission. As Zdarsky presents that, he’s running a story about modern day army recruit David Colton whose story mirrors that of Steve Rogers before he became Captain America. There’s a reason for that.

Valerio Shiti is an extremely understated artist. There’s not a great deal of flash and zing about his pages, and you’d not necessarily be able to put a name to the style without the credits, but the storytelling is perfect in two different styles and there’s an elegance to everything, even the violence. He designs variations on Cap’s costume and his Doom is suitably imposing.

As much as this is about Captain America being slightly different from the confident warrior we know, it’s also Zdarksy’s thoughts on Doom, and the seductive nature of power. When contemplating that, it’s not only Doom whose motives are questionable, as Zdarsky supplies some very uncomfortable truths. Or perhaps not, depending on what you want to believe. Either way, this is a damn fine action thriller.

Our Secret Wars is complete in itself, but also a prologue to Cap and Doom tangling again in the modern era, which follows in Doom’s Shadow.