#the ameridroid

[evilhorse]

I claim this village as my capital

(Captain America #221)

[nitpickrider]

Yes, of course, these are the kinds of things that a sane man in a 30 foot robot Captain America says to his public.

[marvel-dcu76]

Marvel Tales Of Earth-616 - The Ameridroid Attacks By Steve McNiven, Mark Morales, and Justin Ponsor

[apanhadonarede]

(Captain America, 221, 1978, “Cul-de-sac!”, Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema)

[browsethestacks]

Captain America: Ameridroid (1981)

Art by Mike Zeck And John Beatty

[panels-of-interest]

Captain America vs. Ameridroid.

[from Captain America (1968) #262]

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

Hah, I forgot the C.R.A.P. storyline...

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

[sineala]

Captain America Corps

[This is a repost from my Patreon.] An extra review for everyone this month! I wasn't actually planning to write a review of Captain America Corps, but, then, I wasn't planning to love it as much as I did, either. Surprise! This has been the Book Club selection on the 616 Steve/Tony Discord server for the entirety of September, and it took me all month to get around to reading it, and when I finished reading it on Marvel Unlimited I immediately ran to the internet and ordered myself a copy of the trade paperback, because I needed one of my very own to cuddle. This review contains spoilers for the entirety of the series, so leave now if you don't want to know them. (It also contains a few pictures of elements that you may wish to avoid if you are sensitive to body horror in fiction.)

Captain America Corps is a five-issue miniseries written by Roger Stern, whom you may remember from such classics as his Avengers run featuring the Under Siege arc and his short but extremely memorable Cap run with John Byrne. The art here is by Phillipe Briones, who I don't think I've seen in any other book, but it's nice enough, I suppose. Anyway, it was published in 2011 and is also set then (well, sort of) -- so Bucky is still Captain America (though not for much longer) and Steve is Commander Rogers. (It is still available in trade paperback but it is technically out of print, so you should act now if you want a paper copy.) The best way I can describe my feelings about this book is thus: you know how David Michelinie's 1979 Avengers novel I read and reviewed a few months ago, The Man Who Stole Tomorrow, had an amazing premise -- Kang the Conqueror freezes Steve again and takes him to the future and the Avengers have to go time-traveling to get him back -- but it completely flubbed the actual execution of said premise? Well, Captain America Corps is a lot like that, but it absolutely, perfectly nails it. The premise isn't exactly the same, but it is definitely Peak Comics in the best zany madcap way, and the more you know about canon, the more your familiarity will be rewarded. Captain America is being kidnapped. But not just one Captain America -- Captains America across the multiverse are being stolen, and history is changing around their disappearances. A cosmic entity by the name of Tath Ki has made it his business to right these wrongs, and so to do this he kidnaps some more Captains America of his own. He ends up with a team of five: the Captain America of 1941 (Steve Rogers), USAgent (John Walker, from a small but unspecified number of years prior to 2011), the Captain America of 2011 (Bucky Barnes), American Dream (Shannon Carter, from the MC2 universe), and Commander A (Kiyoshi Morales, from several centuries in the future). So you can see already that this is going to be fun. All the Caps, in my opinion, are very well-characterized -- Steve is painfully earnest and a little inexperienced; Bucky is cynical, jaded, and he kind of can't believe that 40s Steve is looking up to him, which is really sweet; and John Walker is, of course, a complete asshole. I wanted to punch him in his stupid face multiple times, so clearly his characterization is perfect. I can't speak to Shannon's characterization because I've never read MC2, and Kiyoshi is new as of this book, but he is also excellent. So, obviously, because this is a Captain America book, there is a terrible dystopian future for them to fight -- and to show them what's at stake, Tath Ki drops them right in the middle of Dystopian Times Square, and they all get rounded up and imprisoned, whereupon they promptly stage a prison break for the various superheroes (Sam Wilson, Luke Cage, Peter Parker...) that they meet, before Tath Ki brings them back to his home base talk about it, now that he's convinced them that this is a future they have to stop.

(The law enforcement of the dystopian future includes several Americops and the Ameridroid. Remember those guys from the Cap comics? I sure do! Whee!) Tath Ki explains the situation here on this Earth, because obviously there has been some divergence. And the divergence point is this: the Avengers never found Captain America in the ice in Avengers #4. Two new women -- Broad-Stripe and Bright Star (why, yes, those are deeply unsubtle code names) -- ended up on the team instead, but, well... the Avengers just didn't work without Steve, and right when they ought to have founded the Kooky Quartet in Avengers #16, they disbanded instead. All because they'd never met Captain America. Thor went back to Asgard. Hank ended up in a psych ward. Tony died during heart surgery. (Don't worry, I'm coming back to this point later. So is the comic.) So the Caps split up to go see what they can find out about the remaining Avengers. Jan is hanging out with Sue Storm but has been warned about Kiyoshi and Shannon by the villain, and she kicks them out. Steve and Bucky break Hank out of the psych ward. And Tath Ki takes John Walker to Tony's tomb... to find that Tony's brain is missing from his body. Uh-oh. That's never a good sign.

And, oh, yes, Broad-Stripe and Bright Star are the villains of this series. And, what's more, Broad-Stripe is actually Superia, whom you will remember from the infamously terrible Cap arc The Superia Stratagem. It was really bad. It was really, really bad. But reading this has now retroactively made reading that worth it. Anyway, they're the ones who have been kidnapping all the Caps, and the Cap Corps here teams up with the local resistance force (yes, of course there's a resistance) to fight their way to the villains' headquarters. And do you know who else is at the villains' headquarters? It's Tony! I mean, it's Tony's brain. In a jar. Alive. And conscious. (And his eyeballs. I don't know why or how he still has his eyes. I'm trying not to think about that.)

The fact that Tony is now a brain in a jar is what the #book-club channel has been shrieking about with horrified glee for an entire month. If you like sad Tonys, there is no sadder Tony than this. You cannot make a sadder Tony than this. He is a brain in a jar. It's like everything about his favorite transhumanism, gone wrong. He's been there for years. He has never known Steve Rogers, and doesn't that just break your heart? He's suicidal. He begs the villain to finally kill him. He begs Hank to kill him, whether or not the good guys win. His life -- or undeath, or whatever it is -- is so awful that death is, for him, the happy ending. (We already know, canonically, that Tonys who never meet Steve are the saddest Tonys. Fantastic Four: Dark Reign #2, the issue that famously gave us Earth-3490, also gave us a look at Earth-1735, in which Steve is found very late in the superheroing game and Tony has clearly spent all the time in which they should have been Avengers together instead drinking his life away.) Sad Brain Jar Tony fills the good guys who find him -- Hank, Bucky, and Kiyoshi -- in on the villains' backstory and plans, which is basically that Superia has been stealing all the Captains America and has joined up with AIM and gotten herself a Cosmic Cube to shove them all into, and I'm sure we all guessed that that was happening because what even is a good Cap plot without a Cosmic Cube? Anyway, 1940s Steve doesn't meet Tony personally, as far as I can tell, but he does get to hear about him being alive over the comms, at least -- although it wouldn't mean much to him then, because at this point he doesn't know Tony. So all the Caps and Tath Ki and the villains end up falling into the Cosmic Cube along with the rest of the Caps that Superia stole, who are already in there. Steve merges with one of his other self, which breaks the Cube, and the alternate dystopian reality basically... vanishes from existence as everyone goes home. And Sad Brain Jar Tony is finally at peace. *sniff* Due to the mysteries of time-travel, Bucky and the two Caps after him -- Shannon and Kiyoshi -- remember what happened, but the two from before -- 1941 Steve and John Walker -- don't seem to. Except when Bucky meets up with his Steve, the Commander Rogers of 2011, it's clear that Bucky's return triggered something and Steve is starting to remember everything. Then Bucky decides to go turn himself in and face justice for the Winter Soldier's crimes. We get a brief look at Kiyoshi's time, where he's helping christen a new aircraft carrier named after Steve. And that's it. So obviously this is a completely wild plot in the way that comics are the best at, and what I really want most in life now is fic where 2011 Commander Rogers -- who we know is not the best at having feelings where Tony is concerned, because his current reaction to Tony is to scream at him about his feelings, in the snow, surrounded by all of their friends -- has to deal with the fact that he remembers being in a world where Tony is a sad brain in a jar and it all happened because he wasn't there to save him. Heroic Age-era (early Avengers v4) is one of my favorite flavors of Steve/Tony angst, as they work out how to have a friendship again (and are so bad at it that it involves a lot of very public screaming fights), and this just piles the angst right on top. (Yeah, guess what's on my WIP list now.) Objectively, it's not a perfect comic -- it's kind of a mess, but it's a mess in that glorious comics way that comics are so good at. I suspect if you're not here for the Steve/Tony you won't like it as much, but if you are... well, please enjoy pondering Sad Brain Jar Tony in his dystopian, Steve-less future.

[juststeveandtonythings]

When confronted by the Ameridroid, original Steve says it’s like something out of Jonathan Swift - Swift being the guy who wrote A Modest Proposal, which was a satirical work suggesting that you could solve your financial woes by selling babies as food.  We can assume Steve’s not a fan of this mockery of himself, but unfortunately, the Ameridroid captures all five of them.

It’s safe to say that all Cap variants say more or less the same thing (and I believe Steve has done something similar in the Captain America: Man Out of Time run).  The convention Shannon is referring to is (probably) the Third Geneva Convention, and while the version we’re most familiar with is from 1949, it was first adopted in 1929, so even original Steve would know about it.

The dudes end up being tortured, while some baddies attempt to emotionally manipulate Shannon (who is the POV character for this issue).  It doesn’t work, and they all escape and free the other “undesirable” prisoners as well, such as this universe’s Luke Cage and Sam Wilson.  Finally, Tath teleports them out of there and back to his little pocket dimension.  It doesn’t look like we’re done with the alternate Steve-less universe yet, though, because the baddies in there decide to go looking for the Cap Crew.

- Captain America Corps Vol 1 #2 (2011)

[evilhorse]

For humanity can only respect a power larger than itself.

(Captain America #221)

[nitpickrider]

One more life destroyed, deconstructed and toyed with by the Red Skull for no other purpose than petty spite. And now? Now Steve's just ready to shut the fucker up on principle.

[ewzzy]

Is it time to bring back Ameridroid? You know the android clone of Captain America with anxiety about being too tall?

Maybe the best part is at the end of the comic he wanders off to live in the woods and Cap is totally okay with that.

[screenhedd-blog]

my OdroidGo is arriving late September... will post my finished build with replacement buttons and transparent paint.

[panels-of-interest]

Captain America vs. Red Skull.

[from Captain America (1968) #263]