Comic Book Day - Marvel Duo (Now with Previews)

Ah, Comic Book Day! Welcome again to another Comic Book Day review, no doubling up this week so look for Worth Every Penny later today or tomorrow. Another two Marvel books but I promise that next week will be a Marvel Free Comic Book Day. Today though, we have Captain America #30 and Penance: Relentless #1. Two great writers and potentially two great books.

Captain America #30 - What a huge issue this is, I'll try to only ruin half of it since it'll be pretty hard not to ruin anything by talking about it. The Winter Soldier faces Crossbones and Sin... and hands them their asses! Bucks got a great line where he asks Sin if she's ever gone up against anyone will real training or that wasn't an innocent bystander, great line! Tony reads Steve's letter that was personally addressed to him and frankly makes me miss the old Steve and Tony. In fact the only time I've like Iron Man as of late was in Cap's book, he's annoying and pretty much just sucks in every title that he's in. Also he's in every title which is very annoying. Nobody liked it when Nick Fury did that shit either, keep that in mind Marvel. Sharron has TWO big moments in this book and I can't tell you either but after the break there will be one of the two revealed in the preview pages so be warned! So how do you have a book that doesn't even have it's main character? Well you give it to Ed Brubaker and let him work his magic. I have to say I'm very glad that he left DC, because I don't think they'd ever let him do what he's doing at Marvel.

Penance: Relentless #1 - If you read Civil War: Frontlines you probably ended up more impressed with it, then the actual Civil War. From the pages of Frontline we received Speedball reborn as Penance. Paul Jenkins took one of the worst characters in comics and made him a character first of all, but also interesting. I'm behind on reading Thunderbolts, but I decided to read this first any ways. The story follow Penance as he is rebuilding his personality after Stamford (See Civil War) and how his brain is dealing with the events. He's under constant supervision and knows it, he also keeps a journal filled with numbers. At this point it's anybodies guess as to what they mean, but Norman Osborn tries to give us some insight as to what he thinks they mean. The Thunderbolts get deployed to stop a Latverian terrorist cell from giving launch codes for missiles pointed at Latverian. The missiles were suppose to be disarmed of course and Doom and Latverian don't know that they aren't so the Bolts are deployed to keep the secrets not the piece. Penance takes down the whole terrorist cell single handed, and let's one of them escape to deliver a message to Doom. Needless to say, any message delivered to Doom demanding something from him is going to result in a not so friendly encounter with Doom at some point in the book. I was rather impressed with this issue, the art was great and the story hooked me, Jenkins and Gulacy are a fine team together and definitely have a hit here.

Here's a SPOILER WARNING for Captain America, so read at your own risk. Also I've included the first few pages of Penance for you to get hooked on.