Tag: captain america

The life and times of Sergeant James ‘Bucky’ Barnes

laporcupina:

Okay, so a little self-referential blahblahblah on Bucky’s NCO career, mostly as a follow-up to the Sam Wilson Is Not an Officer stuff.

(1) At the start of Captain America: the First Avenger, Bucky has been a soldier for a while and a very good one. Whether Bucky enlisted or was drafted, he went to basic training and he emerged some flavor of private or, in truly exceptional circumstances, a corporal. Nobody comes out of basic a sergeant, which is an NCO (non-commissioned officer) rank and one of responsibility. When we meet Bucky in the movie, he’s been a soldier for a while, long enough for at least one promotion up to E-5, two or three promotions being much more likely. Which is a lot in a short amount of time – about a year-and-a-half past Pearl Harbor, less time in service assuming Bucky didn’t ship off to basic in 1941. As such, I’ve usually written Bucky as getting a field promotion for valor in combat because things just don’t happen that quickly. It’s still a speedy trip to sergeant, but it’s not completely ridiculous.

Any way you want to play it, when Steve is asking Bucky if he’s gotten his orders, he’s not asking brand-new-soldier Bucky about his first chance to be a ‘real’ soldier. He’s asking probably-home-on-leave Sergeant Barnes where he’s going next.

(2) Bucky has experience leading small units – a team, a squad. He might have already been a platoon sergeant, but no sure thing. Regardless, by the time he’s rescued by Steve, he’s an experienced NCO. He knows how to get things done, both with respect to regular Army crap and the corralling and maintenance of the men in his unit. He understands how the division of labor between CO and NCOIC works out, that he is the sheepdog to the CO’s shepherd when it comes to executing orders and handling the men. He also understands that the relationship between platoon sergeant and platoon commander is a separate thing between them and has a public face, which is united and in which the NCO is proper and respectful of rank, and a private face, which is more informal and generally reflects the fact that the NCO has more life and military experience than the officer and has an obligation to use those experiences to improve the officer and keep everyone from getting killed.

(3) Both points above matter when it comes to Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers, especially because the latter was commissioned as a captain and has never had a command position before at any level and truly and completely knows nothing about nothing about leading anyone anywhere to do anything in some form of proper military fashion. Bucky’s instruction necessarily doesn’t begin once he’s team sergeant on the Howling Commandos – it begins during the rescue, the minute he realizes that he’s not having a drug-induced hallucination and Steve really is Captain America and needs all the help that he can get because Steve doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Even if Steve doesn’t confess that right away, which he probably will, Bucky knows him well enough to tell.

(4) As important as Sergeant Barnes’s experience is to Captain Rogers, it’s possibly even more important to Brooklyn’s Own Bucky Barnes. Who has been through hell on the battlefield, an even worse hell in Zola’s and Schmidt’s lab, and is now presented with a very hard truth: Steve Rogers doesn’t need him anymore. Steve is no longer frail by many metric; he doesn’t need defending or nurturing, he doesn’t need anyone to advertise his virtues or prop up his self-esteem because everyone else now knows exactly how awesome Captain America is. Steve is no longer short of friends or invisible to women or at the mercy of either his ailments or the neighborhood bullies. Every single protective function Bucky has ever filled for Steve out of friendship and brotherhood has now been rendered moot. Thankfully, while Steve may not need him for anything but companionship anymore, Captain Rogers needs him for a hell of a lot. Steve may be quicker in mind and body, but Bucky is the one who knows how to make everything happen. And that won’t change even as Steve learns the ropes; Captain Rogers will always need Sergeant Barnes. And that’s probably a comfort to Bucky at a time when little else is.

 And now the self-referential part, because I’m like that:

 Antediluvian and La Caduta: the former is Bucky’s pre-movie war career and the latter is his imprisonment, where he struggles to be an NCOIC while also being a lab rat, through the rescue and the formation of the Howling Commandos.

 Recursive, which is a Steve(-and-Bucky) story, but mostly about the Howling Commandos and Steve’s CO-NCOIC relationships with both Bucky and Dum Dum Dugan (after Bucky’s fall) matter a lot.

A great follow up on Sergeant Barnes, NCOIC of the Howling Commandos.

last-snowfall:

This is such a wonderful moment of Sam trying really hard to be a voice of (painful) wisdom and warning and caution and running face-first into Steve the Immovable Object who’s Not Hearing It. Welcome to the rest of your friendship, Sam! He’ll do this a lot.

I feel like this is when Sam meets the Steve that is at the heart of all stories. ‘The man who wouldn’t give up’ ‘The guy who rescued his best friend’, etc.  And when Sam gets his hands on the old SSR files, he’s going to see that guy all over again. This is the guy who said ‘I have them on the ropes’ at the start of CA:TFA. While I wouldn’t call this the dark side of Steve, I would say that this is one of those places where we get to see Steve’s flaws, that stubborn is a defining quality.

And then he and Bucky are going to go out for beers and stare morosely at the game because they won’t even need to talk about it. The Stubborn That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

scifigrl47:

copperbadge:

gege-qurban:

fucknorickremender:

Sales figures from www.comichron.com.

In the month following the hugely popular Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie release, the Remender-penned Captain America solo comic book posted its worst sales since launch, shedding more than 4000 readers (>10%) and falling more than ten ranks. 

Way to pull in all those potential new fans!

His sales were tanking since issue 6. Journey into Mystery Featuring Sif sold 10,000 copies more and it was cancelled on the 10th issue. 

The drop from #1 to #2 cracks me up. I’m sure there’s a drop every time there’s a #1, but I bet its not usually this steep.

It’s almost like nobody cares to read about Steve Rogers in an alien dystopian landscape with none of his friends.

Steve on his own is fine.

As long as he has a sweet van, a vendetta against the government, and a hobo beard.

Remender missed that part of the ‘steve gets SAAAAAAAAAAAD and runs away from home’ arcs.  You know, the fun part.

Also the lady killing.  Puts a damper on things.

Okay, so some back of the napkin math.  (Caveats all over the place for the math. I wanted to see how this worked out.)

Cap 2 made 95mil it’s opening weekend domestically. At $15 a ticket average (regular tickets are around $9 but it also opened in IMAX/3D so I’m gonna skew high), that’s 6,333,333 people who saw the movie that weekend. Assume (generously) that the hard core fans saw it twice, so let’s knock off a third of that. That’s 4.2 million warm bodies that went to see the movie. From the chart it looks like sales are around 36,000 copies. [I’m going to skip the absolute byzantine ways that comic sales are counted. I don’t know if this chart includes digital or not, if returns were counted, ect.] 

But, based on that and assuming everyone who buys the comic went opening weekend (a fallacy but let’s go there), 1 in 111 viewers bought the comic. It was a little tough to track down something about seating capacity but the numbers I saw were 150 to 300. The megaplex I went to had Cap2 in the biggest capacity theaters they had. 

What does that mean? Well, for one thing it means that there were probably 3 people in the room that could have bought Cap #21. And a whooooolllllleeeeee lotta people that hadn’t. 

That, as a comic book fan in general, sucks. I love comics and think they are a great medium for a lot of people. They are (or can be) accessible in ways that a textual heavy book isn’t. It bridges the gap between text and pictures and in the best books, melds the two together. 

It does look like there was a tiny bump between 18 and 19. Probably all those folks who went to the movies then went to their LCS (or who had never been in one before) and said ‘I just saw Captain America. Can I have the book with him in it?’ And they got handed #19 (and probably a few back issues if the store could afford to stock them). None of those people came back for #21 – and some of those that had been getting it stopped getting it.

Are comics for everyone? No. My daughter can’t read comics, the format just doesn’t work for her brain. But .00056% of the movie going audience that weekend is the same audience (with all the caveats above) for Remender’s Captain America title.

That’s so small I’m pretty sure that’s statistically insignificant.

(and this is probably a derail from the bigger point except not, because comics COULD be relevant to culture again except they say shitty things and people aren’t putting up with that any more, at least not as much).

Pierce knows who the asset is and hates Steve Rogers

Yep, more WS meta.

So based on the bank vault scene ‘but I knew him’ it’s clear to both Pierce and the technicians (and Rumlow) that the asset is Bucky Barnes, zombie best friend of Steve Rogers. And having had to put up with Steve’s stubborn ass in SHIELD for the last few years, if only indirectly, I think there is a part of him that definitely wants to break Steve. The showdown scene in Pierce’s office is part pro-forma and part exposition. Schmidt and Zola couldn’t sway Steve Rogers, he has to try.  He tries, knowing he will fail and his ego just can’t handle it.

Pierce’s ego is what drives the earlier timeline in launching the helicarriers. He’s the Red Skull for the 21st century. The bombast saved for a smaller audience.

And using Bucky is the best way to break Steve Rogers. He makes the defeat personal for the final confrontation. He wants Steve to know exactly what they’ve done to Bucky. That they’ve wiped out his best friend and turned him into an enemy. It’s a brilliant bit of mind-fuckery even if in the end it doesn’t work.

youngjusticer:

When asked if he’d like to take over the captain’s shield one day, Sebastian Stan didn’t hesitate to let his intentions be known: “Yeah, I’ll do it right now. I wouldn’t mind a little Black Widow story happening.” Who in the right mind wouldn’t wanna be involved with Scarlett Johansson? On a serious note, Steve Rogers may be thawed out from hibernation and still serving his country, but Captain America isn’t freed from his past. A brawny, blockbuster-formula movie with the brains of an espionage thriller, The Winter Soldier recalls vintage 70s spy romps, yet resonates with contemporary issues about military might, black-ops government conspiracies, historical cover-ups, war, peace, privacy in this digital era, and questions like “Who can you trust?” At least in this film, you can always rely on the hero with the red, white, and blue “boomerang.”

Winter is Coming, by Randi Laing.

So in the comics Bucky was an advance scout and did all the dirty stuff Captain America couldn’t or wouldn’t be seen doing, including sometimes wetwork operations, partly because everyone always underestimated Captain America’s sidekick. How do you think it translated to the MCU?

boopboopbi:

ink-phoenix:

I think it’s most evident in CA: TFA when we get the 2 minutes of Howling Commandos montage (and can I reiterate what a travesty it is that we’re not getting 3 hours of the HC on various missions, seriously, I couldn’t give a fuck, just, give it to me, marvel, make my HC mini series, good GOD).

Now bear with me here: I work in film, and I used to be an editor. There is nothing that makes it into a final cut of anything that is left to chance. Everything you show/not show is a constant uphill battle —with the director, with the producers, with the studio execs, with the stupid MPAA— in Avengers, they had to take out Loki’s spear going through Phil’s chest (it cuts away to his face) to keep the PG13 rating. So. Everything in that montage is there for a reason and the ~violence we see is very stylized. Yeah, they go in guns-a-blazing but you don’t actually see who they’re shooting at. Steve knocks people over with his shield, but you don’t see their skulls crack, you don’t see the whites of their eyes as they fall; they blow people up, but you don’t actually see body parts flying, blood and carnage strewn across the snow.

The only thing you actually do see? It’s when Bucky takes out the Hydra agent. You see it through Bucky’s POV — which is the only time we have a personal POV in the montage, as he looks through his rifle’s crosshair. He shoots the Hydra agent aiming for Steve, and we see the shot connect and the guy die. There’s no cutting away, there’s no ~~shoot to injure which is so typical in PG 13 movies. No. Bucky shoots that fucker in the head and he kills him specifically because he was aiming for Steve. 

That isn’t random. That is the only time we see any of the commandos actually hit a target and kill them dead. And it’s Bucky who does it. 

It’s not much, but it’s a clear choice and it’s there to tell us this is not the first time he does it, it won’t be the last time he does it, and we’re showing this to you because it’s Bucky, and that’s what he does. 

Bucky’s in the Howling Commandos because he’s following Steve. Bucky chooses to do the things he does —all of it, the bad and the worse— because he’s following Steve, not Captain America. There’s an unstable edge, there, I believe, the edge of ‘I’m doing this so you don’t have to’ because Bucky never wanted Steve in this war in the first place; he always wanted to spare Steve the horrors of war, and now that Steve’s here, the least Bucky can do is to take on the darkest side of it. He doesn’t see himself worth preserving. He’s lost his innocence a long time ago, but he’s going to fight for Steve to hold on to his as long as he lives.

This is exactly why it upsets me when Bucky and the Winter Soldier are presented as two completely separate entities when the only thing that actually separates the two (aside from a few decades of torture I mean) is the empathy Bucky shows and the motivations behind his actions.

Bucky killing for Steve and TWS killing for HYDRA are essentially the same thing but for the fact that Bucky’s motivations are powered by love and anger and a million and one other emotions, while TWS is powered by entirely the opposite.

TWS is powered by other people’s emotions.  There are definitely emotions involved, he’s just the wind-up toy weapon.

who of the howling commandos do you think was the closest to bucky (as in friendship)? do you think any of the howling commandos were protective of bucky especially after what he did for them when they were captured and knowing the torture bucky went through at the hands of HYDRA? or is it more of just respect for him? maybe a little of both?

ink-phoenix:

[clutches heart] HOWLING COMMANDOS! You don’t know what you’ve unleashed asking me this, my god.

Okay first of all — if you have never read the comics prequel tie-in for CA: TFA, “The First Vengeance”, you’re missing out. They are a delight. In those comics, you see that Bucky had contracted pneumonia at the HYDRA factory and was beaten within half an inch of his life by one of his captors, Lohmer, because he was too weak to work. Before then, Falsworth, Dernier, Jones and Dugan didn’t get along at all. Different nationalities, rivalries, nobody likes the French, etc etc. When Bucky gets beaten with a fucking missile shell, it’s pretty apparent that he’s not going to be able to make another shift — Dugan says so, and even if another one of their guards might let Bucky off the hook for the first shift, Lohmer certainly won’t. SO WHAT DO THE COMMANDOS DO? (Note: they had been punching each other like, 5 panels before that) — They come up with a plan to kill Lohmer. So that it won’t give Bucky — or anyone else— anymore trouble. 

THERE IS THIS GLORIOUS PANEL WHICH MAKES MY HEART SING: 

“DUGAN, YOU DUM DUM.” I JUST. BUCKY. YOU ARE PRACTICALLY DEAD you were going to die three pages ago. Just. Please. 

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“Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. 

This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — ‘No, YOU move.’”