The background is filled in that helps explain exactly how Hitler gained such fabulous toys.

What They Say:

Follow Captain America through the explosive battles of WWII and discover why he is America’s first Super Soldier. This is Captain America like you’ve never seen him before!

The Review:

The third installment of the half-length issues of Captain America: First Vengeance hits a bit of a snag this time around as the flow of it isn’t quite as strong, even though it does flesh out some key moments. The bookends part of it deals with Cap’s fight against the armor suit that one of the enemy is wearing and it has a small musical aspect to it that ties it to the core of the issue. The core takes us back to 1934 where we see Johann Schmidt making his first approach towards Hitler after an opera where he tries to convince him in simple terms to consider research towards Norse mythology and the like. Playing the angle we’ve seen in the trailers for the Thor movie, he makes the reasoning of science and magic being the same thing, just different aspects of it, and that it should be dealt with because it can open up such potential.

Naturally, Hitler makes some passing agreement about it but it’s one of his men, Von Kaufman, who follows it up as he believes the Fuhrer would want by making sure that Schmidt never gets close to him again, especially because of his heritage. There’s one man there though that doesn’t have such issues and decides to see what he can discover from Schmidt as we see Himmler come up to him, wanting to talk. With so much trepidation amongst fans about how the film will handle Nazi’s since we’ve only see Hydra members in the trailer and basic dialogue about it, seeing the firming up of the relationship between the two and how it comes together prior to what we’ll see there, material like this is definitely helpful. Unfortunately, what it does here is pretty minimal, more theatrical than meaty, and it flows by rather quickly. Compared to the first two installments where it was largely focused on Cap’s youth and formative years up through making his enrollment attempt, this one has a feeling of more distance to it. Yet it does draw you in because of the growing menace it all represents.

Digital Notes:

This issue runs 13 pages, including cover pieces, and has no extras to it. The last page is a rather nice thing to include though, tying to the movie version, as it shows us the good Dr. Erskine looking on at what’s going on..

In Summary:

While I rather enjoyed the first two issues of the series, this one didn’t capture me quite as strongly since it moved away from Cap and what he was going through. The action side is minimal overall, but I really enjoyed the culmination of Schmidt’s story here as Himmler gets his hooks into him. Going back to Germany in 1934 and seeing how some of the pieces come together is pretty good but the short form nature of the book doesn’t give it the room to breathe. Adding a little more context to the movie universe of the Marvel characters has been fun so far but this one takes us down an unexpected path based on what we saw in the previous issue. Of course, they can go only so far with it since they’re dealing with setting up the movie a bit rather than telling a full on tale.

Grade: B-

Pubilshed By: Marvel Comics

Pages: 11

MSRP: $0.99

Distribution: ComiXology via iPad

Writer: Fred Van Lente

Artist: Luke Ross