What
Cap-centric comic would be complete without a brief overview of Cap’s
history. This issue is no
different. We start with Cap’s origin,
which I’m sure everyone knows by now.
After that prelude, we catch up with Modern day Cap and Marv, who are
still on their fetch quest. Why this is
taking place in a “special issue” is one of the great mysteries of this
series. You would think that the special
issues wouldn’t really hold anything too pertinent in case someone wanted to,
or had to skip them for monetary reasons (though the special issues are only
fifty cents more expensive than the regular issues, so I can’t imagine cost
would be that much of a concern). 
Anyway,
Cap and Marv are in Washington DC, a special place for Cap, naturally, that is
now reduced to ruins. They are currently
looking for Mason Harding’s Dimensional Doorway. They find him and he explains that his
dimensional door is on Mount Rushmore.
They use the cloak to travel there, but as they do it, it gives Cap some
creepy nightmares. They arrive at Mount
Rushmore and are met with a deserted old timey town that had monster stuck on
poles, Vlad the Impaler style in a field next to it. The monsters are the inhabitants of the
dimension that the Dimensional Doorway leads to. 
As they
admire the local handiwork, the natives show up to attack Cap and Marv. They are obviously a little leery of visitors,
and considering the fact that by their clothing they are stuck in the
1700s. Cap and Falcon apparently stopped
by to help these individuals control their monster problem at one point, then
they got busy saving the rest of the world and couldn’t be everywhere at
once. Well, these people apparently hold
quite the grudge, as Cap is greeted with
pointed flaming sticks. Luckily, Marv
has his cloak at the ready and they disappear as the disgruntled citizens strike. 
Another
trip through the cloak means another creepy nightmare for Cap. This one shows that the Super Soldier
program, the very one that birthed Cap himself, was nothing but a vehicle for
the Third Reich to dominate. I guess it
wasn’t a coincidence that they chose Cap, with his blonde hair and blue eyes,
as the original test subject. This sends
Dream Cap into a rage and he pummels the Red Skull, which is apparently okay
with him as the Skull believes that if he is going to die, dying at the hands
of his country’s greatest representation of the Aryan race is noble. Then we get a nice shot of a bunch of Germans
saluting Cap…and he comes out of the cloak.
They are outside on a roof, not too far from where the teleported from,
and quickly find the Dimensional Doorway, which is in a basement. Cap helps the citizens, even though they
tried to kill him, against the monsters emerging from the Doorway. Marv collects the Doorway, and makes sure to
mention to Cap that Death is in the room.
The citizens prevent Marv from teleporting away and knock Cap out,
causing him to have another fever-dream.
This one causes him to see the past, a past where he failed the Avengers
by not being thee when they needed him most.
We get a brief history of Cap in the Earth X series, and then Cap wakes
up in shackles. These shackles are
special though, as in the interior of the shackles, pressed against his wrists,
are metal spikes designed to slice his wrist and kill him if he removes
them. 
To
prevent Marv from being killed though, Cap slices his wrists and removes the
shackles, saving Marv and hiding out in an abandoned schoolhouse. Cap comes up with the idea to make a run for
it, to get out of the town before the citizens can kill them, because they are
on their way, and that’s definitely what the citizens plan on doing. Cap does just that, bursting through the line
of people as they shoot at him with Revolutionary War replica weapons. He keeps pushing on, until the amount of
bullets in him prevents him from going any further. Cap dies as Death herself looks in on him,
and we realize that Death was not there for Marv at all.
Later,
a small group of heroes assemble to save Marv and bury collect Cap. Then Cap, like many of the other heroes
before him, goes to the land of the dead, and his fight continues.
Just as
a quick aside before we wrap up, while Krueger remains strong as the writer on
this issue, the artwork by Thomas Yeates is rough. There is very little weight to the art itself
and what really gets me is the layout choices.
On practically every page there are overlapping panels and just a
general lack of flow. Overlapping panels
are okay every once in a while for a change of pace, but to do it through much
of the book, and not have strong, striking visuals to counteract it seems like
an experiment for the experiment’s sake.
Next Issue: Back to the regular series and Marv’s fetch
quest continues. Who will help him now
that Cap is gone? Who wants to help him
since he seems a lot like Batman with his sidekicks?
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