Spoiler warning: this piece discusses the ending of Avengers: Armageddon #4. If that issue is still sitting unread in your pull box, look away now.
Comic readers used to have a saying: nobody stays dead in comics except Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben. Two of those three have since come back, which tells you everything about the saying and a good deal about comics. Now Marvel has killed James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes once more, and if the preview for the next issue is anything to go by, it would quite like us to believe it this time.
The deed was done in Avengers: Armageddon #4, written by Chip Zdarsky with art by Delio Diaz and Frank Alpizar, which went on sale on 16 September. Oddly, it took a while to sink in. Most of the chatter around that issue concerned David Colton, the new Captain America, whose powers turned out to come from an alternate-reality Miracleman, magic word and all. That rather overshadowed the earlier scene in which Bucky is vaporised. It takes some doing for a hero’s death to be upstaged in his own funeral issue, but shouting ‘Kimota!’ will apparently do it.
How it happens is suitably grim. Colton’s plan to rid the world of its nuclear weapons, which Bucky backed while most of the Avengers objected, prompts a rogue Russian faction to launch missiles of its own and spring Thunderbolt Ross, the Red Hulk, from prison. The Russians have tampered with his body chemistry and turned him into a walking bomb. During the battle in Russia he detonates, levelling a city, killing a great many civilians and Bucky with them, and leaving Carol Danvers and Colton badly hurt. As career moves go, being converted into a nuclear device is a long way down from leading the US Army.
What has the story trending again now is Marvel’s preview for Avengers: Armageddon #5, the final issue, which lands on 21 October. It shows Wolverine and Sam Wilson recovering Bucky’s remains, which rather kills the fake-out theory stone dead too. Readers are not pleased. At San Diego Comic-Con, Zdarsky promised he had plans for the character and added, “He’s a beautiful boy, so of course I will do right by him.” Doing right by him, it turns out, involves a gamma-charged mushroom cloud. Writers’ idea of kindness is not the same as everyone else’s.
There’s a neat bit of symmetry for long-term readers, too. It was back in Avengers #4 in 1964 that Marvel established Bucky had died at the end of the Second World War. Sixty-two years later, another Avengers #4 does the job again. In between, Ed Brubaker brought him back as the Winter Soldier in 2005, he picked up the shield after Steve Rogers’ death, died again in Fear Itself and, inevitably, got better. By our count this is death number three, give or take a cosmic retcon.
It also clears the decks. Bucky was already missing from the line-up for Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s new Avengers #1 in November, which features Spider-Man, Wolverine, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Luke Cage and Miracleman. And it all lands while Sebastian Stan’s screen version is very much alive and well and gearing up for Avengers: Doomsday.
Will it stick? Marvel promises there will be a pre-Armageddon and a post-Armageddon Marvel Universe. History suggests a comic book death is less a full stop than a semicolon. By all means grieve, but keep the receipt.
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