Saturday, August 17, 2013

Winter Soldier #17

Winter Soldier didn't last long following the departure of Ed Brubaker (his last issue was #14). Writer Jason Latour and artist Nic Klein took over and brought the title to its cancellation with #19. It's too bad because they were doing topnotch work. Latour crafted a narrative around a victim of one of the Winter Soldier's assassinations, a sympathetic female heavy named the "Electric Ghost." The story is given weight with its themes of fear and sentimentality and time consciousness. Nic Klein's pencils and colors are totally alive -- no cookie-cutters used here. I thoroughly enjoyed this comic book. Check it out if you can. Latour and Klein's run was Winter Soldier #15 through #19.

With Edward Snowden's revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance and lawlessness regularly making the news, I found the depiction of metadata in the five scans from the beginning of Winter Soldier #17 to be beautiful. Buck Barnes, a.k.a, the Winter Soldier, has just shot his way into an A.I.M. data hub: "More information in these walls than literally anywhere else on earth." It sounds like Latour had NSA's Utah Data Center in mind when he wrote that line. The disembodied talking head of super-spook Nick Fury floating against the backdrop of huge video display terminals captures the government's ambitions for total information awareness:





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