I’m going to be honest: I don’t have a lot of energy for this. I was all in when Priest wrote a dense and layered Black Panther, full of misdirects and subplots, because the story wasn’t impossible to follow and there were interesting explorations into the world of the powerful African king.

This series is just confusing.

Cap’s odd behavior during the “Disassembled” arc and earlier is explained: He’s been under psychic attack. But Falcon is acting weird, too, as he uses guns to bust some street criminals and steals their money–and he’s more loyal to the Anti-Cap than Captain America himself.

Meanwhile, there’s a nice MODOK story that parallels Captain America’s origin in some ways. Cap was created via a super soldier serum, and the mystery of the formula has been the subject of many storylines. This very story, in fact, has the Anti-Cap. Well, now AIM is trying to use MODOK’s DNA to destroy their own creation, while MODOK himself hunts down and kills all the scientists responsible for his mutation. I thought the initial issues indicated that AIM was making a bio-weapon, but it turns out it was just a weapon to use against MODOK.

MODOK merges with a drug lord somehow as a result that wasn’t a bioweapon but was in fact an anti-MODOK weapon but instead of killing him gave the drug trafficker space inside MODOK’s giant head (again, this is a very confusing story). The big finale has Hulk in it, too.

But by this time I’m just skimming and looking at the pictures.

Cap is supposed to be dead at the end of this arc but come on, we all know better than that.

There are some interesting ideas here and some great sequences. It’s a Priest script, so the dialogue is good. It just doesn’t hang together.

Some fun Easter eggs: There’s a beer on a table called Mjolnir Beer…

…And a reference to future Captain America artist Steve McNiven…