Previewing today's release of the first issue from Marvel's much-hyped, star-spangled, series, the publisher yesterday released an eight-page, online-only prelude issue by Reborn writer Ed Brubaker and artist Luke Ross that offers more hints at just what is going on behind the scenes of the Captain America title, as well as tying events into Marvel's larger Dark Reign storyline. What role does the daughter of the Red Skull have in the resurrection of Steve Rogers? And have they thought what the acronym HAMMER actually stands for yet? Clues are dropped and teases are laid, and all for free. What more could you ask for?

Reborn Prelude [Marvel.com]

One of the things that keeps popping up when writer Captain America writer Ed Brubaker and editor Tom Brevoort talk about Reborn is that bringing Steve Rogers back has always been part of the plan. As Brubaker told MTV,

There was never any thought on my side that we wouldn't bring him back, so it's not like there was ever a fight about it...I only killed him with the intention of bringing him back.

Brevoort has echoed this, and said something that caught our attention:

We've been planning the story of Cap's return virtually from the moment that he died... you'll be able to look back into [Captain America #25] and the issues that followed and see the assorted seeds we planted once we reveal what's been going on in Reborn.

Assorted seeds? Sounded like a reason to re-read the issues to us. But when we did, we realized that not only was that statement true, but that we were all idiots for not realizing what was going on first time around.

Let's start at the end, shall we? Steve Rogers' end, that is. We've known since the issue after he was shot that all was not as it seemed when it came to Cap's "death." After all, what kind of gunshot wound results not only in death, but in this?
In the same issue, main series villain the Red Skull meets with one of his minions, onetime Nazi scientist turned robot Arnim Zola, to discuss a recent acquisition from fellow evil mastermind Doctor Victor Von Doom:
See where we're going already? Don't worry. It'll become more obvious.

As the storyline's main thrust - which sees the Skull attempt to bring about America's downfall through capitalism and democracy while former sidekick and former brainwashed-assassin Bucky Barnes take over the role of Captain America to stop him - continues, the villains fall out, as tends to happen in these cases. One of the reasons for their rift? The treatment of their prisoner, and Steve Rogers' ex-girlfriend, Sharon Carter... who has a mysterious purpose that we only get hints about more than a year after Rogers' death:
What's that about a "platform"...? Well, here's where we take a slight leap of faith, but not an incredibly unlikely one. We know, after all, that Zola has been working on technology involving time travel from Doctor Doom, so we're guessing that he's talking about Doctor Doom's Time Platform, a Marvel Comics mainstay since 1963's Fantastic Four #5. But what's does this have to do with Sharon (or Steve Rogers, for that matter)? Later in the same issue - #41, for those of you out there who really want to know - the other side of the villainous rift, evil psychiatrist Dr. Faustus, talks to Sharon and spills the beans:
"The Constant"? To a generation of Lost fans, that phrase means only one thing: Desmond and Penny. So, if Sharon is Penny, then surely that means that Steve Rogers is, somehow, lost in time. Let's take another sideways trip off Memory Lane and look at Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for a second, which has been cited as an influence on Lost's episode "The Constant". Mr. Vonnegut, would you please explain to the class what Billy Pilgrim learned about death in the classic novel?

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die... All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist... It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

What if the reason Steve Rogers' body shriveled up wasn't because he was dead, but because his soul had been ripped out of it, and sent bouncing around time without any control? After all, the recent Captain America #600 revealed that he hadn't been shot by a regular gun...

But without a body to come back to - and that body is gone, let's face it - what could Steve Rogers come back to? Well, let's look and see what happened when the Red Skull and Zola tried to use the still-unexplained device:
Oh, Sharon, if only you hadn't destroyed the machine at the point where the whole thing was going to be explained to us...

To add some fuel to our fire, you have Captain America: Reborn editor Tom Brevoort revealing more than he probably meant to in a Marvel.com interview:

All during these months, while the world thought him dead, Steve's been on a metaphysical journey of his own, and the experiences he's lived through during that time are going to have a profound effect on his state of mind.

A metaphysical journey like being trapped in time and forced to relive his life, perhaps? Such a journey would give Steve Rogers - when he returns - a new view on life as Captain America, new readers a chance to get acquainted with the character's possibly daunting backstory, and the preview pages we've seen from the first issue to be less straight-up flashback and more involved in the actual story than initially thought.

If our guess about exactly what's been going on is correct, of course. For all we really know, Steve Rogers has just had amnesia after waking up on the mortuary slab and swapping his body with a handy melting clone all those months ago...

Captain America: Reborn #1 is released on July 1st. Feel free to come back and tell me when I'm shown to be horribly wrong.

A fairly in-depth review points at the possibility that, well, the original Captain America didn't exactly "die" in the first place. There's talk of the gun that delivered the fatal shot not being "a normal gun," and villains mumbling to themselves that most people "don't know what happened" when Steve Rogers was shot. Add to that the appearance of a character from an alternate Earth and traditional Cap villain the Red Skull monologing as if Cap is still alive, and it's beginning to look as if there was less a traditional death than some kind of disappearance to another world. The story, of course, is far from over - in fact, it's trailed as continuing in Reborn, the series that Marvel has previously been very reticent in offering details about until now.
For a series as realistic - as realistic as you can be in a world full of superheroes, at least - as Captain America, retconning the death of your main character with magic guns and alternate worlds is a very risky move that may just alienate fans, no matter how well it's done. Considering the mainstream publicity that Marvel got from killing Cap a few years ago, bringing him back in such an outlandish fashion could easily backfire and ruin the critical reputation of a series that has continually received great reviews for its believable plots and characterization. Of course, those reviews are in response to a series that has already shown villains' personalities jump bodies with the use of "cosmic cubes", and former WWII soldiers turned into brainwashed cyborg assassins, so all bets may be off...

For what it's worth, we're hoping that this is some kind of swerve, and that Reborn will have more than a few tricks up its sleeve in order to deserve the push that Marvel is apparently planning to put behind it. If nothing else, we're hoping to be convinced that Steve Rogers deserves to come back to life — and, presumably, the Captain America uniform and identity — at all. We're pretty taken with Bucky's Cap, thanks very much.

Update: Marvel's PR breaks: Steve Rogers is coming back to life in Reborn, but no details are given. Luckily, Marvel's own website is a bit more forthcoming.

The announcement of the new release date for the issue - the first time in more than a decade that a comic has been released on a day other than Wednesday (Holiday bumps aside) - doesn't give a reason for the shift, but it's worth noting that the new release date is also the day that, according to Marvel, their new series Reborn will "be receiving nationwide press... possibly on par with the media coverage we received during Civil War".

Previously, rumors about Reborn - which, so far, has received no advance publicity or even explanation, in a move that has angered retailers who are having to place orders (and, as said orders will be non-returnable, spend their own money to gamble that the series will find an audience) without information on the contents of the series - have centered around the potential return of the original Captain America, dead since 2006's Captain America #25 (No, there haven't been 575 issues of the comic in the last three years, in case you're wondering; #600 is really Vol. 3 #51. Don't ask), but with the recent release of a preview image for Cap #600 featuring a character from the parallel Earth-series Heroes Reborn, it's now possible that the title may refer as much to the 1990s "Reborn" line/Earth as any specific character. Either way, expect to find the start of Reborn's story in the early release of Captain America #600.

When contacted for this story, Marvel Comics refused to comment.

Images from Captain America #600, courtesy Marvel Comics.

All we know about Reborn is the creative team (Brubaker is joined by Ultimates artist Bryan Hitch), the price and the length of the series (Five issues). The only other information is that the official solicitation will be coming soon. But Brubaker's involvement suggests a Cap tie-in, and the solicitation for June's issue of the regular Captain America was certainly teasing that something big was about to happen around Rogers' death:

Where were you when Captain America died? It's the anniversary of the day Steve Rogers was killed, a day of reflection and mourning in the Marvel U...a time to look back on the things Steve did and what he stood for... or is this issue actually the beginning of the most wicked plot twist since issue 25? Yeah, actually it's both.

Of course, this is where the second guessing comes in - Brubaker's too smart to think that we wouldn't assume that a comic called Reborn would be about the return of the original Captain America, so maybe this is a swerve (That Cap solicit does promise a "wicked" plot twist, after all), but at the same time, maybe he assumed that we'd assume that it was a swerve, so it will be Steve Rogers after all... Unless he assumed that we'd assume that he'd assume that we'd assume, and... Well, you can take it from here.

Reborn #1 hits stores in July.