Spoiler warning: this piece discusses the ending of Avengers: Armageddon #5. If that issue is still sitting unread in your pull box, look away now.
Last week we reported, with the weary air of people who have been here before, that Marvel had killed off Bucky Barnes in Avengers: Armageddon #4, turning the Red Hulk into a bomb and the Winter Soldier into a eulogy. We did point out that nobody stays dead in comics. We simply didn’t expect the funeral to last a single issue.
Chip Zdarsky’s Avengers: Armageddon #5 arrived in shops on 21 October and saves its biggest moment for the final pages. The opening recap pointedly lists Bucky among the dead, before the story jumps to Plesetsk thirteen days after the explosion, where the Winter Soldier is found beneath the snow, battered, regenerated and barely able to speak. Standing over him is Nick Fury Sr., who greets him by his old codename and tells him, more or less, to get up because there’s a world to save. No grapes, no flowers, no get-well-soon card. Classic Fury.
The how and the why will be answered, or at least artfully deferred, in Immortal Soldiers #1, a one-shot from Zdarsky and artist Christian Rosado that arrives on 13 January 2027. Ben Harvey’s main cover confirms Bucky and the elder Fury as the double act, with variants from Mark Chiarello, Aco and Declan Shalvey. Marvel has also shown off a new costume design for Bucky, so he at least found time for a wardrobe change during his brief stay in the afterlife. The solicitation insists that Armageddon didn’t end the war, it started one, which is the sort of thing comic events say when the sequel has already been printed.
The title is doing some honest work. Fury, kept ticking over since the Second World War by the Infinity Formula, has never grasped the concept of retirement. Bucky, by our count, has now been dead three times and back three times: killed in 1945 (retroactively, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1964), resurrected as the Winter Soldier by Ed Brubaker in 2005, seemingly killed again in Fear Itself and swiftly revived, and now this. “Immortal soldier” is starting to read less like a codename and more like a medical record. Marvel says the one-shot will lay the groundwork for its next year of stories, and with Armageddon leaving the wider world having turned its back on superheroes, there’s a promising whiff of Cold War paranoia about whatever Fury is cooking up in the snow.
The main event rolls on regardless. Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto launch a new Avengers #1 on 4 November, with a line-up of Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine, Luke Cage and Miracleman. Miracleman in the Avengers is the kind of sentence that would have caused a minor seizure at a 1985 Warrior readers’ meeting. Bucky, meanwhile, has absorbed the most important lesson in superhero comics: death is merely a long weekend.
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