Captain America and Hawkeye #629 Review

Marvel Comics
Captain America and Hawkeye #629 Review
By Andy Frisk
May 7, 2012 - 19:30

Marvel Comics
Writer(s): Cullen Bunn
Penciller(s): Alessandro Vitti
Inker(s): Alessandro Vitti
Colourist(s): Javier Tartaglia
Letterer(s): VC’s Joe Caramagna
Cover Artist(s): Gabriele Dell’otto
$2.99 US

Cullen Bunn’s (The Sixth Gun, Wolverine) other Marvel Comics’ gig has him writing the adventures of Captain America and Hawkeye in the appropriately renamed, and formerly titled, Captain America and Bucky. Captain America and Hawkeye #629 stars Clint Barton/Hawkeye and Steve Rogers/Captain America in the first part of an adventure that leads them to The San Andreas Mountains, and White Sands Missile Range, in search of some environmentalists that have gone missing. Guess, that’s what Avengers do when they're not saving the world from alien invasions and bigger things: go searching for lost environmentalists. Anyway, they run into the head of the local Damocles Research Facility whose members have been doing secret government work involving “the advancement of space flight technologies.” They have other problems though. It appears some kind of dinosaur-like monsters are attacking the facility and have even somehow mutated some of the facilities members into weird looking monsters themselves. Kashmir Vennema, the facilities head, swears that they have nothing to do with any of it, but, of course, Cap and Hawk aren’t convinced of that…

Cullen Bunn likes monsters. For his first arc as writer on Wolverine he’s brought back Dr. Rot and his monsters to torment Logan. He’s cooked up some, at first glance at least, rather uninteresting monsters for Cap and Hawkeye to do battle with. Honestly, unless he’s just setting things up, the story is pretty boring and throwaway (at least at this point). How many times have we seen this story before? Well, the record setting Marvel’s The Avengers wasn’t exactly groundbreaking with its plot as well, but it was so well written, acted, directed, and filmed that it felt like something brand new. The same thing can almost be said about Captain America and Hawkeye #629 (substituting sequential art verbs for movie verbs). Just hopefully, Bunn just won’t continue to deluge us with never ending “creature features.”

Alessandro Vitti (Secret Warriors) brings and excellent sense of realism and grittiness to CAaH #629. His work on Secret Warriors was top notch and he continues to live up to the expectations he established on that title. Even if Bunn continues to languish in the monster theme for a few more issues, Vitti’s art alone would make a return trip to the title worth it.

CAaH #629 isn’t a bad first issue for the “All New Creative Team!” but it isn’t anything edgy or particularly deep or interesting either. It is well written with some excellently snappy dialogue (although not quite on Joss Whedon’s level) and some incredible artwork. Bunn is a good storyteller. Hopefully, he’ll get to cut loose in the future with Cap. Maybe after the Avengers movie hype settles down and Marvel Comics isn’t dumbing down the Avengers’ adventures in order to lure in the potential movie fan.

Rating: 6.5/10