Volume 54: Captain America: The Chosen

Captain America: The Chosen

Author: David Morrell |  Illustrator: Mitch Breitweiser

"I'm no hero. All I want is to get out of here. To go home. To hold my family. To sleep without nightmares."

We're told in the introduction to The Chosen that David Morrell, the author of the work, is the same David Morrell that wrote First Blood (1972), which most of us will probably know better as the first Rambo film starring Sly Stallone. I mention that because First Blood was Morrell's début novel, and The Chosen is his début comic book. If you do the maths, there's 35 years between the two, and it's clear while reading the Captain America story that it sprung from the mind of someone who had little experience with the comic medium.

Please don't take that as a purely negative comment, having a comic that doesn't read like a comic is a refreshing change from the norm. The novelist's mindset that Morrell had meant he was more used to building characters from the ground up, whereas with Capt. he had to work within an existing, established framework. Perhaps that's why he chose to focus on what Steve Rogers in costume represents; i.e. the hero as inspirational, totemic symbol for the common man.

The man in question is a US soldier stationed in Afghanistan, a Corporal by the name of James Newman. Morell gets deep inside Newman's head, exploring his emotional state and the affect conflict has on him. I got the feeling that the author was more comfortable with the blank slate soldier than he was the super-soldier.

Besides the 'USA = Freedom' stuff that many new writers of Capt. America default to, the human parts of the story are well-told. But there's a bizarre element upon which everything else is built that I was less involved with. It wouldn't be out of place in an X-Men story, but in Steve's own world it was all a bit too left field to be believable.

As such, while I enjoyed the book, especially that it wasn't all set in boring New York, a part of it was also off-putting to me. But the partial ambivalence made me curious about how Morell might structure something with characters that are 100% of his own making, something that's completely non-superhero. Maybe someday I'll take the plunge into one of his novels.

The book collects together Captain America: The Chosen #1-6.

Verdict: