I can’t get behind Reborn. I think it’s kind of a waste of time. I will give you a dollar if you can explain things to my satisfaction. Here are some questions to get you on the right track:

(SPOILERS)

Exactly how is Rogers ‘lost in time?’ So Crossbones shot Cap with a bullet and then a mesmerized Sharon Carter shoots him in the stomach a bunch of times with some sort of retarded ‘temporal gun’ that, does what now? Freezes his body in time so that he doesn’t die, as well as put a lot of holes in his stomach?

Why is Sharon Carter Steve’s temporal anchor or whatever? Because she happened to be holding the gun that shot him?

Can Steve affect the past he’s ’stuck’ in, or not? He keeps narrating that he’s forced to relive his past from moment to moment, doomed to not be able to change anything, except for that one time where he leaves a message in the Vision for people to find in the future (which somehow survives the bajillion freaking times the vision gets destroyed or mindwiped over the years).

If the Red Skull wanted to jump into Steve’s body what is all this time stuff? (by the way, to me this is not new or surprising; Skull formerly occupied the body of a Rogers clone for a long time, if anyone remembers that from ye olde John Walker days, and since Skull seems to be able to possess people’s bodies, of course he’d want the perfect body back again.) If I understand it, he’s not jumping into Steve’s dead body, because it’s full of bullet holes; instead he’s pulling a past version of Steve Rogers out of the past, which somehow has the consciousness of his present self, and inhabiting that instead? Is that right? If that’s the case, then why did Skull arrange it so that Sharon shot Steve with a bunch of ‘time bullets’ or what-the-fuck-ever? And if he’s pulling Steve’s physical body out of the past and into the future, what happened to the course of history after the moment that Steve Rogers suddenly disappeared from whatever moment Skull nabbed him from?

THIS STORYLINE, IT MAKES NO SENSE. It is super DUPER complicated and I think Brubaker could have thought of a number of less confusing ways to resurrect Steve Rogers. In fact, I’m sure he could because I CAN.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say this mini series diminishes the death of Captain America in the first place. His assassination was so well-orchestrated, it was diabolical and clever and packed a wrecking ball emotional punch, but now it’s all like, “Oh, it was always this secret plot to shoot Captain America in the face with time itself so that Red Skull could jump into his body or something.”

Bah. I don’t own these comics so I can’t go back and re-read them to try and figure out what’s going on, but I shouldn’t have to. The constant re-reading of a property in order to gain the slightest understanding of its contents is NOT good writing.