>From March 6, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone: Metaphors for the effects of the Bush Presidency on the American spirit don't get any harsher than this one: Last year, Captain America, who had been fighting Nazis, supervillians and sometimes his own government in the pages of Marvel comic books since 1941, was shot dead.
And now, in the series' latest sign of the times, a new, more morally compromised character has taken over the stars-and-stripes uniform: Cap's former kid sidekick, Bucky, who spent a few years as a brainwashed Russian assassin and is now a gun-toting killer. Ed Brubaker, the former indie-comics writer who's been working on Captain America since 2004, sees his riveting version of the comic as an "espionage thriller." "It's not meant to be totally reflective of the American psyche," he says. "But at the same time, I'm part of the American psyche, so maybe there is something of that seeping out there." In an even more directly relevant plot line, longtime CAp villain the Red Skull is now the head of a multinational corporation - and he's aiming to destroy the country by foreclosing on mortgages and driving up oil prices. Brubaker has been hoping to do that storyline ever since the Enron scandal. "How much of our country are we giving away to these vast corporations that have no one to answer to at all!" he says. "If there's any politics of my own in the book, it's that part."
