Summary of the Winter Soldier arc
May. 1st, 2022 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
loran_arameriThis is a very broad summary of the first 14 issues of the Captain America (2004) run (minus #10 which isn't part of the storyline) with a focus on Bucky. The Brubaker run is also a very good read if you like Steve and has a lot of consequences for him, but I won't be going into that.
Steve is working closely with SHIELD, Sharon (aka Agent 13) and Director Fury especially, and is having a terrible time in general. (This is likely a result of the events of Avengers Disassembled which happens before the start of this arc which destroyed his home and his family (the Avengers) and put to question the trust he placed in people, but I still haven't read disassembled, so what do I know.) He’s ruthless and unmoored and takes a lot of risks. He’s spending a lot of thought on the past, wrangling with feelings of guilt.
There are several events that somehow connect back to Steve, giving the impression that there is some connection to his past or someone is targeting him specifically:
The Red Skull turns up dead. Sharon and Steve prevent several terrorist attacks (planned by the Red Skull before his death) in Manhattan, Paris and London. Jack Monroe, a friend and former sidekick of Steve, gets killed. The graves of three men who at some point wore the mantle of Captain America get desecrated. Someone is manipulating Steve’s memories and his mind.
More and more evidence points towards former Soviet General Aleksander Lukin, now head of the powerful Kronas cooperation, as pulling the strings in all of the events. Unbeknownst to Steve and SHIELD, Lukin is in possession of the cosmic cube, and he’s from a village called Kronas.
Kronas was completely destroyed in World War II during a joint mission of Soviet troops and Cap’s Invaders due to one of the Red Skull’s weapons self-destructing and Colonel Vasily Karpov (later General Karpov) not listening to Steve. Karpov found the orphaned Lukin after the fighting ended and raised him. Steve knows that Karpov held a grudge against him after Kronas. He’s not aware of Lukin’s connection.
Finally, Lukin orders a bomb attack on Philadelphia. He only gives the order after Steve arrives to rescue the kidnapped Sharon. The destruction is horrible. Carrying out Lukin's orders is an operative with a metal arm who both Sharon and Steve recognize as Bucky who has been thought dead since 1945. Steve and the operative have a stand off, but when Steve calls him Bucky he doesn’t recognize the name.
Fury has more information, and all clues add up to the attacker actually being Bucky. Fury makes the connection to a myth of a KGB assassin called the Winter Soldier who can pass as an American easily and is so good at killing that it was hard to distinguish assassinations from accidents, an excellent fighter with rifle, knife and hand-to-hand. The myth also said that he was kept on ice whenever he was not on a mission.
There is evidence that the Winter Soldier killed the Red Skull, killed Jack Monroe, kidnapped Sharon and set off the bomb in Philadelphia.
Steve takes it as well as one could expect; he smashes the screen which holds the evidence photos.
Attempts to go after Lukin and get more evidence for his responsibility for the bomb attack are prevented by Lukin’s and Kronas’ connections to the US government.
No one besides Lukin knows that the Red Skull is not completely dead, but his consciousness lives now within Lukin and they share a body (yay, comics). Both have a common goal in making Steve suffer. However, the Red Skull manages to send Steve the original file on the Winter Soldier program without Lukin's knowledge who only notices when it's too late. The file details what they did to Bucky and what he did as the Winter Soldier.
The files detail that Lukin searched for Steve after the drone explosion that supposedly killed them both but found a lifeless Bucky with one arm missing instead. Doctors later were able to reanimate him but he had lost his memory and was extremely aggressive. They put him back into stasis for years until a KGB special unit gave him a metal arm and managed to manipulate his mind in a way that made him controllable for their purposes. He was then used for decades to carry out assassinations in Western countries. As the mind manipulation proved less stable than planned, he was kept in stasis most of the time and the process was redone often.
Steve shows the files to Fury and Sharon. One question causes disagreement: can Bucky be saved or does he need to be stopped. Steve feels responsible for his friend and former partner while Sharon believes that his actions show that he’s not Bucky anymore. Steve thinks details of the files prove that some part of Bucky remembers who he was and is fighting the control.
Lukin sends the Winter Soldier away with the Cosmic Cube because he has come to fear the cube's influence on him.
Steve gets help from Sam and Tony to go after Bucky to save him. From AIM they learn how to track the cube to a Kronas daughter company. Tony decides to not go with them because he can’t act against a competitor without it falling back on his company. SHIELD and Sharon however join Sam and Steve as backup.
Steve fights Bucky directly for the second time. It becomes clear that the Winter Soldier has no quarrels about killing Steve, but when Steve questions that he has no memories of who he was before, the Winter Soldier becomes agitated.
Steve obtains the Cosmic Cube during the fight and uses it to give Bucky his memories back.
After regaining his memories, Bucky says that Steve should have killed him, destroys the cube and disappears.
Steve is working closely with SHIELD, Sharon (aka Agent 13) and Director Fury especially, and is having a terrible time in general. (This is likely a result of the events of Avengers Disassembled which happens before the start of this arc which destroyed his home and his family (the Avengers) and put to question the trust he placed in people, but I still haven't read disassembled, so what do I know.) He’s ruthless and unmoored and takes a lot of risks. He’s spending a lot of thought on the past, wrangling with feelings of guilt.
There are several events that somehow connect back to Steve, giving the impression that there is some connection to his past or someone is targeting him specifically:
The Red Skull turns up dead. Sharon and Steve prevent several terrorist attacks (planned by the Red Skull before his death) in Manhattan, Paris and London. Jack Monroe, a friend and former sidekick of Steve, gets killed. The graves of three men who at some point wore the mantle of Captain America get desecrated. Someone is manipulating Steve’s memories and his mind.
More and more evidence points towards former Soviet General Aleksander Lukin, now head of the powerful Kronas cooperation, as pulling the strings in all of the events. Unbeknownst to Steve and SHIELD, Lukin is in possession of the cosmic cube, and he’s from a village called Kronas.
Kronas was completely destroyed in World War II during a joint mission of Soviet troops and Cap’s Invaders due to one of the Red Skull’s weapons self-destructing and Colonel Vasily Karpov (later General Karpov) not listening to Steve. Karpov found the orphaned Lukin after the fighting ended and raised him. Steve knows that Karpov held a grudge against him after Kronas. He’s not aware of Lukin’s connection.
Finally, Lukin orders a bomb attack on Philadelphia. He only gives the order after Steve arrives to rescue the kidnapped Sharon. The destruction is horrible. Carrying out Lukin's orders is an operative with a metal arm who both Sharon and Steve recognize as Bucky who has been thought dead since 1945. Steve and the operative have a stand off, but when Steve calls him Bucky he doesn’t recognize the name.
Fury has more information, and all clues add up to the attacker actually being Bucky. Fury makes the connection to a myth of a KGB assassin called the Winter Soldier who can pass as an American easily and is so good at killing that it was hard to distinguish assassinations from accidents, an excellent fighter with rifle, knife and hand-to-hand. The myth also said that he was kept on ice whenever he was not on a mission.
There is evidence that the Winter Soldier killed the Red Skull, killed Jack Monroe, kidnapped Sharon and set off the bomb in Philadelphia.
Steve takes it as well as one could expect; he smashes the screen which holds the evidence photos.
Attempts to go after Lukin and get more evidence for his responsibility for the bomb attack are prevented by Lukin’s and Kronas’ connections to the US government.
No one besides Lukin knows that the Red Skull is not completely dead, but his consciousness lives now within Lukin and they share a body (yay, comics). Both have a common goal in making Steve suffer. However, the Red Skull manages to send Steve the original file on the Winter Soldier program without Lukin's knowledge who only notices when it's too late. The file details what they did to Bucky and what he did as the Winter Soldier.
The files detail that Lukin searched for Steve after the drone explosion that supposedly killed them both but found a lifeless Bucky with one arm missing instead. Doctors later were able to reanimate him but he had lost his memory and was extremely aggressive. They put him back into stasis for years until a KGB special unit gave him a metal arm and managed to manipulate his mind in a way that made him controllable for their purposes. He was then used for decades to carry out assassinations in Western countries. As the mind manipulation proved less stable than planned, he was kept in stasis most of the time and the process was redone often.
Steve shows the files to Fury and Sharon. One question causes disagreement: can Bucky be saved or does he need to be stopped. Steve feels responsible for his friend and former partner while Sharon believes that his actions show that he’s not Bucky anymore. Steve thinks details of the files prove that some part of Bucky remembers who he was and is fighting the control.
Lukin sends the Winter Soldier away with the Cosmic Cube because he has come to fear the cube's influence on him.
Steve gets help from Sam and Tony to go after Bucky to save him. From AIM they learn how to track the cube to a Kronas daughter company. Tony decides to not go with them because he can’t act against a competitor without it falling back on his company. SHIELD and Sharon however join Sam and Steve as backup.
Steve fights Bucky directly for the second time. It becomes clear that the Winter Soldier has no quarrels about killing Steve, but when Steve questions that he has no memories of who he was before, the Winter Soldier becomes agitated.
Steve obtains the Cosmic Cube during the fight and uses it to give Bucky his memories back.
After regaining his memories, Bucky says that Steve should have killed him, destroys the cube and disappears.
