The first issue of the post-Brubaker run on Captain America came out this week. As Doom DeLuise wrote, and I agreed with, Ed Brubaker made Captain America cool again. So who’s the creative team on the relaunch? Rick Remender (don’t know him), John Romita, Jr. (not a fan) and Klaus Janson (I dig him!). It also still stars Captain America, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I can’t put it any more clearly than to say that this is the Captain America I remember from my childhood: a really stupid character on stupid adventures I couldn’t care less about. I cannot imagine a bigger departure from what Brubaker did for this character.

Within the first eight pages, which includes a brief flashback and the opening scene, we are treated to not one, not two, but three really lazy cliches! We have a drunk Irish man; we have a slutty woman trying to flirt her way out of a ticket; we have a team of environmentally conscious supervillains who toss out jargon like “Fascist!” and end sentences in “Man!” Because that’s how environmentally conscious people talk! It’s also what Irish men are like and what women do, for the record.

(As a side note, what’s actually kind of tragic about this was that I got to the “Green Skull” part and thought “That’s actually kind of cool!” I could see a Green Skull villain — someone calling on the iconic history of the Red Skull but having some kind of planet-wide genocidal agenda — being kind of awesome in a “Dark Knight Rises”-Bane sort of way. I encourage some of you less-lazy writers to do something with this character.)

The story was so bad I forgot to even be bothered by John Romita, Jr.’s art. It’s been worse, I guess. Probably anyway. But man — I say like an ecoterrorist — what a way to kill off the revived Captain America brand. Jeesh. Bring on issue #800 or whatever big anniversary reboot they’re building up to.