Captain America: Symbol of Truth #14 // Review
Sam Wilson has been through hell. Maybe he just wants to relax. Maybe he just wants to workout. Or maybe he’s feeling a little restless. Whatever it is that he wants, he’s going to get something else entirely. It is his birthday, after all. There are a number of people in his life who want to help him celebrate, whether he wants that celebration or not. This is the least of his concerns in Captain America: Symbol of Truth #14. Writer Tochi Onyebuchi explores the life of Sam Wilson just a bit more with the aid of artist Ze Carlos and color artists Jesus Aburtov and Photobunker.
Sam Wilson just got through a battle with Bucky Barnes. It’s never easy to fight someone like that. On a physical level, he’s really, really experienced and trained. On a psychological level, fighting a soldier with the kind of history Barnes has is going to crawl inside a person’s head and live there for a while. So naturally, Wilson needs some time away from the wings and the shield to really think about what it is that he’s doing. Maybe a little bit of a surprise birthday party might be what he needs.
Onyebuchi is carving a very balanced path through the mind of Sam Wilson. The issue finds a path between the action, the drama, and the more abstract ends of Wilson’s life in a sharp look at the psyche of a hero. The stress is clearly there in a way that hasn’t often been explored in the comics. The psychological toll of being Captain America had only rested somewhere in the background for Steve Rogers. Wilson is allowed to be a bit more conflicted about things...a situation that makes for a much deeper look at a soldier than Captain America has historically been allowed over the years.
Carlos has a remarkably sharp and nuanced emotional sense of layout. Wilson isn’t constantly thinking about all of the stresses that he’s been through...but the weight of service is clearly there and can be felt on every page and in nearly every panel thanks to Carlos’s resonant sense of layout. Wilson doesn’t just workout and head back home. There’s silence there throughout his multi-panel exercise. There’s silence as he approaches the front door. There’s so much that rests in silent panels without embellishment. It’s a subtly complex approach to telling the story of a hero.
The actual center of the issue’s conflict may not be terribly interesting, but Sam Wilson is, in and of himself, more than enough to carry the bulk of the book straight through. There’s a strong and palpable sense of inner conflict that could easily be the center of everything. That psychological connection between character and reader is often a lot more difficult to achieve than a fully engaging action conflict, so Onyebuchi is doing a solidly respectable job with the title.
