‘Captain America’: Ed Brubaker and the salvation of Bucky Barnes [updated]

GB: What did you like about Bucky when you were a young reader?

EB: He was my favorite character as a kid. The Captain America series [of the Silver Age] started with issue No. 100 and when I was 8 or 9 years old I went to my first comic-book convention [and] I looked [at] the ones that came . I had issue No. 100 [from 1968] all the way through whatever and I assumed that issue No. 99 must have been the one that came in 1945 where Bucky got blown up. I totally believed there was a comic book where Baron Zemo captured Captain America; I thought that this story that they were always referencing in Marvel stories was in an actual comic book. When I found out that wasn’t the case at all and that they had made Captain America and Bucky comics into the 1950s. The whole “Bucky died in 1945″ story that was so huge in the mind of fans was something that they came up with in the 1960s when Stan [Lee, the famed Marvel editor and writer,] said “New era, no sidekicks.” At age 9 or 10 I was saying, “If I ever write Captain America I’m un-doing this mistake.” It didn’t even happen in the comic and it made me mad.

GB: Um, that’s not the response most youngsters would articulate. Most would shrug.

EB: I also drew a distinction at age 10 between Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy [who each were killed off in the pages of "The Amazing Spider-Man" in the 1970s] and Bucky Barnes. Most readers grouped them together because they were the three that always stayed dead but they weren’t the same to me. Uncle Ben actually dies in the comic and Gwen Stacy, I actually witnessed her death. You didn’t see Uncle Ben die but you saw Gwen die and you weren’t 100% sure that Spider-Man didn’t cause her death when he tried to save her. But Bucky was the first ret-conned death. My reaction was “It doesn’t count. I can fix it somehow.”