Review: Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #4
Last ish, we left Bucky in the throes of love at first sight, staring off into an alien sunset with his newfound girl, Queen Ventolin, while everyone else was busy trying to figure out just what the fuck is actually going on.
We open this issue with Daisy quizzing Old Buck on just why he’s here. He has also taken the liberty of “changing her perception to show what his reality looks like”, which is a crap way of saying that Marco Rudy is not drawing most of this issue. Instead, Langoon Foss turns in some work that appears to be inspired by Nick Pitarra’s work on Manhattan Projects. Now, nothing against either of them, as I love MP as well, but Marco Rudy is why we’re reading this book, and everyone knows it. Quit fucking with us, guys.
Anyhow, Taking a cue from Spiderverse, we jump to Old Buck’s backstory, 200 years in the future of an alternate dimension, with him seemingly in retirement; The entire universe having come to a peaceful conclusion to all war. The peace being one of logical agreement amongst all races, rather than dictated by any one, at that. Old Buck and his best bud, (Tony Stark’s robot assitant from the first Iron Man movie, as far as I can tell) are just hanging out, arguing about music while tattooing a white flag across the red star on his cybernetic arm.
Old Buck takes a stroll to a heavily secured room to visit a giant blob of iridescent liquid metal, whom he asks to search the multiverse for “lovers”. As he scans through the multiverse, we see bits of Bucky and Ventolin, never quite the same image, but always the pair. That is, until we scan past Universe 616. It’s just an image of Bucky in a pool of blood. This immediately galvanizes Old Buck into action. As he abandons his peaceful life, suits up and shoots himself into a black hole, we’re left to wonder why one dead Bucky out of millions matters so much.
Aaaaaand….. relax. Ahhhh. Whew! No one panic, everyone, Marco’s back. Old Buck sends Daisy to find Bucky, as his plan has gotten them to Mer-Z-Bow a few days before his deadly premonition, and out of the sphere of Old Buck’s reality-bending influence, Marco Rudy’s paints soothe us into a nice comfortable psychedelic trance…
…soooo pretty…
Oh. Sorry. Lost my train of thought there. Where was I? Oh yeah… But wait, guys, Buck’s not answering the phone! Daisy patrols the palace halls, finding no trace of Bucky, when suddenly, someone finds her!
But you’ll need to pick this one up yourself to find out who. (I will say, though, that last panel’s a doozy!)
