During his storied career as Captain America, Steve Rogers has fought alongside a number of allies. However, the burden of wielding his signature shield and embodying the ideals his nation is supposed to represent has been his alone to bear. That all changes this April with the release of Captain America #0 from writers Tochi Onyebuchi, Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, and artist Mattia De Iulis. The upcoming Marvel series finds Steve and his best friend and former Cap, Sam Wilson, wielding shields and co-serving as Captain America.
That doesn’t mean Steve will take it easy. In June, Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty by Lanzing, Kelly, and artist Carmen Carnero, also launches and follows Steve as he makes the most of his new situation by building a new life and confronting the shadowy conspiracies that have manipulated him and America’s sinister history. CBR spoke with Lanzing and Kelly about their plans for the book which include character arcs for the Winter Soldier and Steve’s girlfriend, Sharon Carter. They also teased the introduction of a whole host of new allies and enemies and promised a massive story that will inform and eventually tie into Sam Wilson’s monthly series launching in May, Captain America: Symbol of Truth, written by Onyebuchi and with artwork by R.B Silva. Also included with this interview are preview pages from Sentinel of Liberty #1 with artwork by Carnero and colorist Nolan Woodward.
CBR: One of the interesting things about Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty is you have Steve Rogers in a unique position. He has a fellow Captain America to help wield the shield and be a symbol. What does that mean for Steve?
Jackson Lanzing: That was the immediate question we had as well. What was exciting is that it allows us to take the book and refocus away from the day-to-day style Marvel Universe Captain America adventure — things like Captain America fighting the Red Skull, or Cap teaming up with the Daughters of Liberty. We saw a lot of that stuff done really well in the recent Ta-Nehisi Coates run and many, many runs before.
So, this presents an awesome opportunity to let Steve figure out what it means to be Steve Rogers and Captain America simultaneously in his own way. What happens when he’s no longer burdened with the day-to-day of going out into the world and constantly being Captain America out there? What does it mean to be Captain America at home? What does it mean to be Captain America in a place where he can build a community?
We’re looking back at runs that meant a lot to us like the Mark Waid-Ron Garney run, which did such a wonderful job of establishing a home, a place, and a cast that belonged to Steve Rogers. It wasn’t a Captain America cast. It was a Steve Rogers cast. That’s something that we’re looking to do in this new era for Cap. That all kicks off with Steve finding the old apartment building that he grew up in back in the day in lower Manhattan, and renting that same room that he and his mom grew up in. It’s changed quite a bit, but he’s going to put down roots and try to figure out what it means to be part of a community. Not just a community of superheroes, but a community of Americans.
Collin Kelly: By freeing Steve of the burden of being the Stars and Stripes of the world he’s able to look at those questions that have maybe been simmering for a longer time. Such as, “What is the secret behind my shield?” That’s what really kicks off our adventure, the realization there are far more secrets here than even he imagined, and now he has the time to pursue them.
Is this a story about Steve confronting some of the ugly, corrupt, and powerful forces that lead to Captain America’s creation, and that is possibly still active in the 21st century?
Lanzing: Quite! Other Captain America stories like Truth and the runs of Ed Brubaker and Ta-Nehisi Coates have taken on some gritty, real-world subjects. The big thing that we are interested in doing though is taking that fundamental question of, “What are the forces of power and corruption that exist around us at all times? What are the invisible bars that keep all of us within our society? And keep us all in line? Who are the bullies that are so big that it’s impossible to even see their influence without coming upon it yourself? How do we turn Cap on to them?”
We’re going to expose Steve and the rest of the Marvel Universe to a conspiracy that is much larger and much more mad science than all of that. We want to take Steve and what he fights back to something that I think is at the core of the character — that Jack Kirby-style pulp expression of heroism that’s not simply about the very small, but it’s about the very small contrasted against the fantastically large. That’s really what this book does. It whiplashes between Steve Rogers as a man in his neighborhood and Captain America fighting a force that is larger than any he has faced before. That fundamental whiplash is what makes this book so special.
Steve won’t be confronting these shadowy forces alone. He’ll be teamed with the Winter Soldier, who in your recent Devil’s Reign: Winter Soldier tie-in showed he had very strong feelings about being manipulated by corrupt and powerful forces. What can you tell us about Bucky’s role in this book? And will he and Steve be on the same page?
Kelly: That’s an excellent question. Bucky is obviously one of our favorite characters as well as a contrast to Steve. He’s Steve’s best friend and we know a little bit about working with your best friend and having your life on the line based on their choices. [laughs] So, we really wanted to bring that friendship to this relationship.
As you saw, Devil’s Reign: Winter Soldier was effectively a prequel. It was a #0 issue to our #0 issue. It sets up how Bucky himself has been manipulated by the same order that is pulling Steve’s strings. So, we need to bring these two friends closer together than ever before. As to where that goes? Obviously, any good friendship is nothing without a little disagreement. So, yes, we’re going to introduce some schisms between the two of them because what it means to be controlled is very different for each man. How they react to that revelation is going to put them pretty diametrically opposed.
Lanzing: Bucky has a point in the Devil’s Reign: Winter Soldier where he outright says a thing that Colin and I both see as a core tenant of the character. Bucky was not “redeemed” in a very natural way. He was unprogrammed by the Cosmic Cube. People who follow the character in places like the MCU have seen this very gradual transition of Winter Soldier back into Bucky Barnes. In the comics, though, Bucky was effectively force rebooted by Steve. He came out the other side with very little understanding or memory of what he had done. He’s been going through the process of trying to rediscover and reunderstand exactly who he was and why he was what he was.
So, in this story, Bucky is finally able to look his actual past and legacy in the eye and try to come square with it. Unlike the MCU Bucky, who is a little bit more balanced in his redemption, this Bucky is going to have a lot of weight and expectation on himself to do right now that he’s getting a chance to look at how much wrong he did. That kind of intense self-reflection can sometimes make you step too far and can make you step into shadows that you weren’t aware you could step into.
This is the next big step on Bucky Barnes’ journey, and it’s not a small one. It’s one that’s not just going to impact his relationship with Steve, but his relationship with the whole Marvel Universe. It’s a door we’re really excited to open, but I’m warning the fanbase that it’s going to be a very painful door to open. There are a lot of things that hurt to write in there. I have to assume it’s going to hurt to read. That’s the kind of story where you know you’re on to something special — when you start to play with the live wire on the story and realize that there’s a reason why that wire is live [laughs]
Kelly: It’s really important that we’re not invalidating the Winter Soldier program or anything in Bucky’s history. That’s not what is pushing this story forward. We’re weaving into the tapestry of what was done to him and paying respect to what’s come before. It’s all part of taking charge of this legacy and it’s an incredible honor.
Plus, past stories show the nature of conspiracies in the Marvel Universe to be interconnected. It makes sense for things like the Winter Soldier program to be tied to the Weapon Plus Program.
Lanzing: Exactly. That tiering of conspiracies is the very nature of the story we’re telling. We, as Marvel fans, for a long time have looked at these webs of conspiracies and thought, “They sure do intersect a lot.” Rather than just leaving it at, I’d argue that Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty takes that head-on and says, “Do you want to know the fundamental truth behind all of the conspiracies of the Marvel Universe? Here it is!” We’re taking a large swing at moving that side of the universe forward and revealing a lot of secrets. So, we’re really excited. It’s a surreal experience.
One of the Sentinel of Liberty promotional images shows off a skull masked character that I affectionally call Jack Flagg via Warhammer 40,000. What can you tell us about this character and their role in the story?
Lanzing & Kelly: [laughs]
Lanzing: We’re going to be really cagey because I like people to find out who this is in the context of the issue. It has a lot of dramatic importance that is tied to what we’re doing. That said, if you want a clue, I recommend that people go back to the Invaders and look for that skull in their original lineup. That will give you a starting point to some of the things we’re thinking about.
You mentioned Steve’s apartment building earlier. So, it sounds like Sentinel of Liberty will have a rich cast of supporting characters.
Kelly: Yes, we have this amazing supporting cast because, as we pointed out, it was really important for Steve to have a community around him. There was an idea that got floated early on in the process that we just absolutely fell in love with and became crucial to the story. It’s that Steve has started to take digital art classes at his local community college. He’s a pencil sketcher, but it’s 2022! It’s time to get with the program and learn how to use Procreate. Because of that, he gets to naturally intersect with this cast that we absolutely love like David, a young cyber security expert who is taking app design and figuring that out.
Lanzing: There’s also Mia, a young woman in Steve’s class who has infinite patience for his complete inability to operate Procreate. There’s Hudson, an older, black man, who’s been part of the New York scene his whole life. He knows the city like the back of his hand. He also has a different view of Captain America and Cap’s legacy.
There are also people outside of that class. There’s a young boy in Steve’s apartment building named Amari who’s going to develop a mentor/mentee relationship with Steve. We’re really excited about that because it lets Steve directly address the lessons young people learn and that we learned from watching Steve. It also gets feedback on Steve because Amari is a young black man in New York and is going to have a different set of challenges than Steve did as a young white man growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. So, looking at how those two things shove against each other is something we’re very interested in.
Kelly: We also have his more superhero supporting cast. We already talked about Bucky, but we’re also huge fans of Christopher Cantwell’s United States of Captain America. There are some great characters in there that we certainly didn’t want to leave on the table. Jack also mentioned there might be some characters more linked to his past. And of course, there’s Sharon Carter.
What can you tell us about your plans for Sharon?
Kelly: We have deep and awesome plans for Sharon! They’re going to simmer for a while though. Sharon is off on a kick-ass adventure that will come back to roost with its own consequences, but we need Steve to have the space to form this community without his relationship deeply tied into it. So, when she does reenter the story it’s going to be wild.
Lanzing: In the Waid-Garney run, Sharon is kind of a messy person who is much more willing to get into a bar fight and jump in first. She’s got a kind of a Leroy Jenkins, “Get out of my way vibe!,” in those books that have sometimes gotten sanded off in favor of her becoming Captain America’s girlfriend. I think even she is unhappy about that. So, we’re looking at what it means to be Sharon Carter, not just as Captain America’s girlfriend, but as an espionage agent. Outside of those contexts, who is Sharon Carter when she’s just Sharon Carter? Who is she and who can she become? That is another place where I’ll refer you back to the Invaders, but we can’t tell you why.
What’s your sense of Captain America’s rogues gallery? And what would you like to add to it?
Kelly: You can see in the #0 issue that we’re getting to play with our favorite scientist, Arnim Zola, THE BIO-FANATIC! [laughs] That’s a really fun touchstone for us, but what we wanted to do is introduce a new cast of villains. These villains pulling the strings have their own personalities and motivations and they command a force unlike any Captain America has ever seen. That includes lieutenants, generals, and power players. They are critical players in the history of the Marvel Universe, American history, and the world history of the last hundred years.
We’re giving those characters individual identities that will allow them to stand on their own. So, if and when we do bring in some more of these legacy villains, we want them to be able to stand toe-to-toe with Doctor Doom… These will be characters that Doom also knows of and is reluctant to cross.
Lanzing: It was a big thing for us to come on to Captain America and decide we weren’t going to do another Crossbones or Red Skull story. I think some of the best stories you can tell with those characters have been told. So, we’re going to bring in a new supporting cast and new villains. We’re going to bring in a new context for the shield and Steve’s legacy.
It sounds like that new stuff has an established foundation that you build upon, things like the Invaders…
Lanzing: We’re giant research nerds. When we get a new job, we get into it. What’s fun on Captain America is we didn’t need to do a whole lot. We’re lifelong fans of the character and have already read most of the stories. So, we go back and revisit things, but after you go back and revisit, there’s all of this other history. There’s American history, there’s world history, and the real-life events that have intersected all our lives. Steve lived through World War II which we all understand and live through our modern era. There’s this whole period of history that he missed in the middle there. And that period of history, unchecked by Captain America, is filled with secrets and conspiracies.
So, we’ll look at how much went down between when Steve went in the ice and when he came out, and how much of a cage has he been in since he came out that he never realized was there.
Artist Carmen Carnero’s knack for character acting, and big, kinetic action makes her a perfect fit for a Captain America book.
Lanzing: Yeah! Wait until you see what she’s doing with action in this book! We gave her a page suggestion in issue #1 and she turned it into a signature style. There is a way that action is done in Sentinel of Liberty that is distinct and unique in the Marvel canon right now. I think you can tell a Sentinel of Liberty action sequence by looking at it. That’s because of Carmen. She’s creating this stylistic mood in the same vein as some of my other favorite collaborations like the Fraction/Aja Hawkeye. You could just tell a Hawkeye scene by the style and the way details are pointed out. Carmen is doing her own take of something like that.
Kelly: We did a book for DC called Gotham City Garage. It was kind of an Elseworlds-take on “What if the heroes of the DC Universe had been wiped out before they had a chance to become heroes?” We had this really cool cast of punk rock supporting characters that stepped into those roles and motorcycled around the wasteland. Carmen was one of our first artists on that and her work was stunning. Then, when we were talking about artists for this book, and they mentioned Carmen it was like, “The band is getting back together!”
Lanzing: It took us about two issues to put Steve on a motorcycle. [laughs]
Finally, say there was a teaser trailer for what’s coming up in Sentinel of Liberty. What sort of things might we see in it?
Lanzing: There’s actually a teaser trailer style page at the end of Captain America #0 that does this pretty effectively.
I think the teaser for this whole run though is just the shield. It has not meant what we all thought it meant. What secrets does it hold? And what stories does the shield unlock once we understand the core, fundamental truth at the heart of that symbol? That’s the book. That’s where all the drama and all the new villains are going to form out of — taking this symbol that we see everywhere, rethinking it, and revealing the core truth behind it.
That sounds like a storyline that could eventually carry over into Captain America: Symbol of Truth as well.
Lanzing: You can count on it. We are in total lockstep with Tochi. The books are individual stories, but they really inform one another. The more you understand one, the more you understand another. We’ve made no secret that this isn’t about doing a single Captain America book. It’s about establishing a corner of the universe for Cap and all of the characters and tones that exist there. So, as we build this out further, hopefully, there will be room for other Captain America books. We’re really excited about the opportunities.
About The Author
For all the latest Comics News Click Here
For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News.
