Broken Frontier

Captain America takes a break from planning his resistance group’s next course of action against Tony Stark to further investigate the Red Skull’s activities.

The "Drums of War" storyline has been taking its cues from Brian Michael Bendis’s current formula for featuring solo stories in New Avengers. Now with that being said, we’ve already had stories that focused on Sharon Carter and the Winter Soldier, so now the next logical step is to centre upon the good Captain himself.

In this story Cap gets a tip from Nick Fury which leads him to one of A.I.M’s old secret bases where a group of Hydra agents are now operating. While posing as a Hydra agent, the good Captain manages to get inside undetected and quickly surmises the dangers this terrorist cell poses, so he decides to bust up their operation as quickly as possible. Surprisingly enough, the ruckus alerts the attention of SHIELD agents who descend down upon the scene like flies to honey, forcing Cap into another confrontation as quickly as the last one ended.

Now this one wasn’t as pedestrian as it sounds. In fact Ed Brubaker takes time from writing all these high octane action sequences to squeeze in a few developmental scenes to push the proceedings along. In doing so we get a glimpse of the Skull’s latest maniacal plans as well as discovering Sharon Carter’s involvement as per SHIELD’s latest field assignment. Beyond that, Ed takes the time to hammer out hard hitting dialogue coupled with several quality story beats to make this issue another great read from start to finish. He even managed to stun readers with a big ending that revealed the appearance of another old foe from Cap’s past, so this should definitely add more fuel to fire for the next issue.

I also think having another great artist like Mike Perkins, in addition to having Steve Epting in the fold, was an astute move by the fine folks at Marvel. It’s great that both artists are used on alternating arcs, and this time around we were graced with Mike’s fluid storytelling abilities. This guy can flat out draw any kind of scene and make it look as dynamic as ever, so it’s no wonder he’s been employing strong artistic skills on a book that relies heavily on action and intrigue every month. About half way through the action gets kick-started into high gear and Mike paces the scenes with lightning speed and always makes Cap look like a swift fighting machine.

So if you are looking for solid storytelling that is by far extremely consistent on a monthly basis then give this series a try. The last story arc was bang on when it came time to hit the mark and the "Drums of War" seems to following the same trend. Come to think about it, this trend was pretty much established at the very beginning of this series and I don’t see that changing much in the near future.