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Captain America is a 2004 comic book series published by Marvel Comics. The series is written by Ed Brubaker with art by Steve Epting. A landmark run on Captain America, the series is hailed as the best ever on the title

The series is notable for reviving Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier in issue #6, the presumed death of Steve Rogers in issue #25, and Bucky taking over the mantle of Captain America in issue #34.

The first issue was released November 17, 2004. The series ran for 50 issues, with the final issue releasing May 20, 2009.


Captain America (2004) story arcs with their own pages include:


Captain America (2004) provides examples of:

  • Aborted Arc: The final issue of Captain America And The Falcon Vol. 2 ended with the implication that the Falcon might have been killed by Anti-Cap, as well as the real Captain America finding his abandoned costume fluttering in the wind. Word of God is that the Cliffhanger was meant to be a Sequel Hook for a solo Falcon series by Christopher Priest, but it fell apart when Priest left the project. However, when the Falcon reappears, he is back to wearing his costume, and there was no mention of his disappearance or the prior incident with Anti-Cap.
  • A Day in the Limelight: Issue #7 was based entirely around Jack Monroe (the former Bucky), with Cap only appearing in flashbacks. The issue even tied up some loose ends from Monroe's short-lived Nomad series just before he is murdered by Winter Soldier.
  • Age-Gap Romance: Zig-Zagged with Bucky and Natasha. While he was born several years, if not a couple of decades, before her, he spent all but a total of ten out of sixty years in cryosleep, while she has been living them in her artificially induced ageless state. Subverts Mayfly–December Romance after Bucky got a dose of the Infinity formula to save his life.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Played with. Women will once in a while express attraction to Bucky due to his reputation as the Winter Soldier, but he is decidedly not a bad boy.
  • Amnesiac Resonance: This happened to Bucky quite a bit in the 1960s and '70s. He would break his programming to the point that he knew his Soviet handlers were his enemies and run away, but he was never able to actually recover much memory of his identity. One of the reasons they started cold storing him (besides prolonging his natural lifespan) was to take away any time he could spend thinking for himself in an attempt to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
  • An Arm and a Leg: It's revealed that Bucky gave his left arm trying to stop a bomb plane from launching during WWII.
  • Anti-Hero Substitute: Bucky as Captain America subverts this, sort of. He's a Classic Anti Hero, so he doesn't carry the same connotations this trope usually does.
  • Artificial Limbs: The Soviets replaced the arm Bucky lost in World War II with a cybernetic one. After he loses his Soviet one stopping the Red Skull's Sleeper, he gets a new arm from Nick Fury which has a lot of handy abilities, such as an EMP. It also allows him to handle and throw Captain America's shield properly, making him (alongside Hawkeye) one of the only two non-super soldier serum-embued people to be able to use it. The arm Fury provided also turned the red Soviet star into a white star surrounded by blue and red.
  • Ascended Extra: The character who would become Sin was originally an incredibly forgettable generic straw villain from the early Comics Dark Age, with a completely different name, costume, power set, and indeed, personality and appearance. She was reused once, in a goofy plotline that involved Captain America de-aging into a teenager, then never again for some time. But Ed Brubaker wrote her into his plots (and substantially rewrote the character while at it), and from then on she's been a somewhat major villain.
  • Back from the Dead: Bucky did in fact die in that rocket explosion, but the ice cold water preserved him so that the submarine crew that found him could revive him as if he had just died. Exploited, as he was periodically frozen cryogenically by the Soviets, who kept bringing him back to assassinate particularly hard-to-kill enemies. He did it again after Fear Itself.
  • Badass Boast: When Clint Barton tried to justify killing Norman Osborn by pulling out the "If you could go back in time and kill Hitler" argument, Bucky simply chimes in that he did kill Hitler.
  • Bald of Evil: After Captain America: Reborn, Sin has a face like Red Skull, complete with a total lack of hair.
  • Battle Couple: Bucky Barnes and Natasha Romanoff, who fought alongside him in his capacity as Captain America.
  • Big Damn Kiss: Sin with Crossbones, when she went with the team that rescued him out of S.H.I.E.L.D. custody. Made villainous by the fact that her team had shot their way through a small army of S.H.I.E.L.D. Red Shirts on the way, and she literally still had their blood on her hands.
  • Birthday Episode: In issue #50, after looking back at how life has seemingly passed him by and how he hasn't had a proper birthday with the high-risk life he's led, Bucky is greeted by Black Widow and the rest of the New Avengers with the first birthday party he's had in over sixty years.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy:
    • Bucky is this as the Winter Soldier.
    • Sharon is brainwashed into killing Captain America and actually did fire that apparently ended Cap's life. Of course, that bullet wasn't as fatal as first thought.
  • Brainwashing for the Greater Good: Sin was brainwashed by S.H.I.E.L.D. into forgetting who she really was.
  • Breakout Character: Bucky Barnes. He was just another teen sidekick when introduced, and then killed off in flashback by Stan Lee when he reintroduced Cap into the Silver Age. For decades Bucky became a running joke as "one of the only characters to stay dead" in comics. Fast forward to 2005, and at the very beginning of the run Ed Brubaker proceeds to bring Bucky back as the Winter Soldier, a brainwashed assassin used by the Russians during the Cold War who is eventually freed from control and goes on to become a well-characterized anti-hero. And then when original Captain America Steve Rogers was killed, Bucky wound up taking over the mantle to honor his partner. And he wound up becoming such a hit that when Steve was inevitably brought back to life, the fans actually didn't want him resuming his old identity and replacing Bucky. And for a little while, they got their wish: Bucky remained Captain America and Steve operated without a code name as the new Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.. While Steve eventually became Captain America again, Bucky continued to be a major part of the Marvel Universe, getting his own series, then leading the Thunderbolts — the major role he's played in the MCU has catapulted him into Marvel's A-List.
  • Brought Down to Badass: This happens in one issue when The Falcon is captured and stripped of his wings by a group of extremists. Unfortunately for the terrorists, nobody informed them that the Falcon was an accomplished brawler long before he met Captain America, or that he spent several years fighting alongside Cap before even getting his flight harness. Cue epic ass-whupping...
  • Casting a Shadow: One of The Man with No Face's powers.
  • Celebrity Paradox:
    • The series revealed that the Captain America film serial from the 1940's exists in the Marvel Universe. There's a bit of Fridge Brilliance to this: in real life, the serial changed up Cap's origin and name so that his civilian identity was Grant Gardner rather than Steve Rogers. Ergo, the serial could exist in the Marvel Universe without having jeopardized the real Cap's secret identity in any way.
    • It's also shown that Marvel Comics is the publisher of Captain America comics in-universe. After The Death of Captain America they sold the rights.
  • Cerebus Retcon: Bucky Barnes, Captain America's Kid Sidekick during The '40s, underwent this when brought back by Ed Brubaker. The original version of his origin was that he was a cheery fanboy of Cap who accidentally discovered his secret identity and thus was recruited as his partner to keep the truth from getting out. Then Bucky died in a plane explosion and after that putting kids in harm's way looked like a less appealing idea for Marvel. Captain America: Winter Soldier then retconned his first origin as propaganda, with the truth being that Bucky was an orphan who grew up on a military base most of his life and when partnered with Steve was essentially a teenage assassin, intended to do the black ops work Captain America couldn't be seen doing. So Bucky went from kid sidekick to Child Soldier and then to Anti-Hero when he was brought back as Winter Soldier.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: Before appearing as one of the lead villains in the Captain America Corps mini-series, Bright Star first appeared as an unnamed reporter in one issue.
  • Child Soldier: Originally, Bucky was the camp mascot, but he effectively became this when he entered combat as Cap's sidekick. Later justified in modern comics with him being 15 at the beginning in 1941, with the commanding officer commenting that he was just a few weeks shy of 16 (the US military occasionally ignored such borderline age cases then), with it becoming a non-issue by the end of the war with him being 20. However, the explains it as Bucky having been an army brat, taken in by the camp and trained alongside the soldiers after his dad died. As the brass realized his potential, they even had him train with the British SAS.
  • Classical Anti-Hero: Despite being a good person at heart and genuinely wanting to do right by his country, he is plagued by his desire to make up for the wrongs he did as the Winter Soldier and by doubts as to whether or not he can actually do the mantle justice.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Bucky is far quicker to resort to less dignified forms of fighting. Playing possum and then unloading a full clip in someone's face, pulling a woman's hair, whatever.
  • Convenient Miscarriage: Averted. Following Civil War, Sharon discovered that she was pregnant. She was then taken captive by Red Skull and, after a fight, was found stabbed in the abdomen. The next issue revealed that she had done it to herself to keep her baby away from the Skull.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Aleksander Lukin, as CEO of the Kronas Corporation.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: For a time, after being released from his Soviet brainwashing, Bucky continued to wear the same black leather costume he did as the Winter Soldier while working for Nick Fury and helping Cap from the shadows. Even his costume as Captain America contains more black than red-white-and-blue, but he's every bit as nice as Steve is.
  • Deep Cover Agent: The Winter Soldier often served this role during the Cold War; he could easily pass for an American, because he actually was one. Bouts of Becoming the Mask, or rather, Fighting from the Inside, in his case, while on mission, led to his superiors' decision to place him in suspended animation between missions.
  • Depending on the Artist:
    • Is Bucky's gun a .45 or a Luger?
    • Bucky's mask. Are the eyes whited out or not? The majority of artists draw it as not whiting out his eyes, but a few don't.
    • And if you can see Bucky's eyes, what color are they — blue or brown?
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: In a one-shot where Bucky teamed up with the Young Avengers, though he got along well with the black teen hero Patriot (he was friends with the black Human Top and the Japanese-American Golden Girl during WWII), Kate Bishop called him out on his language after he referred to a group of Mooks as "pansies." Kate pulls out "some of our best friends are [gay]" Barnes says he meant it in the sense of "wimps", probably aware that pansy has been used as a slang term for gay men since the 1920s.
  • Dirty Communists: Who he worked for as the Winter Soldier during the Cold War. In modern times, he was awakened from cryonic storage and commissioned by Renegade Russian Aleksander Lukin, which led to the discovery of his existence by Captain America.
  • Dragon Ascendant: Following her father's apparent death, Sin took on the Red Skull identity.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Played straight with Jack Monroe (the former 50's Bucky and later the costumed Anti-Hero Nomad). After wallowing in Comic-Book Limbo for years, he showed up issue #7, just to be shot and killed by the Winter Soldier. The same fate befell the Red Skull's former lover, Mother Night.
  • Early Installment Character-Design Difference: During her first appearance, Janice Lincoln, the new Beetle, was clearly a white woman. Her expanded role in The Superior Foes of Spider-Man would later reveal she was the Afro-Dominican daughter of Tombstone, and her skin was darkened to reflect this development.
  • Empowered Badass Normal: While Bucky is only an extremely well-trained soldier, his bionic arm plus unaging Infinity Formula allow for being able to hold his own against anyone up to Type 3 in Super Weight.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Crossbones with Sin, as he stormed a S.H.I.E.L.D. ase to rescue her.
  • Faking the Dead: Bucky after being presumed dead in Fear Itself. Only Steve Rogers, Black Widow, and Nick Fury know of his survival, because if word got out that he's still alive, it's back to the gulag for him.
  • First-Name Basis: Bucky has this on both sides with Natasha , to demonstrate their intimacy. She's one of the few people who regularly called him "James" while he's similarly one of the few to call Natasha by her real name, "Natalia".
  • Former Regime Personnel: Aleksander Lukin was a member of Department X (the Russian analogue to SHIELD) before he went rogue.
  • Grand Theft Me: The consciousness of Schmidt was transferred to Lukin's body by Arnim Zola.
  • Hero Killer: It looked like Sin killed Bucky in Fear Itself. Turns out she almost did, but Cap faked his death.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity: Bucky is reviled by the public at large early in his stint as Captain America, but understandably so, considering Steve Rogers was assassinated not too long ago. And again after he was discovered by the public to have been a cold war assassin for the Soviets.
  • Human Popsicle: When Bucky was not on the job, his Soviet owners had him cryogenically frozen.
  • I Let Gwen Stacy Die:
    • Cap was haunted about his Kid Sidekick's death until it turned out he was Not Quite Dead. Later he got to be haunted about his Kid Sidekick's transformation into a Brain Washed assassin.
    • Bucky failures resulting in Natasha having to forget all about him.
  • Indy Ploy: As Captain America, in contrast with Steve's Crazy-Prepared-ness, Bucky's tactical ability was often displayed through his prodigious reliance on these. Lampshaded by Sam in "Two Americas", when he comments that Steve had already warned him that Bucky's idea of tactical planning was basically "rush in and get captured".
  • Intangibility: One of The Man with No Face's powers.
  • Internal Homage: When Cap first confronts the Winter Soldier, the Soldier says "Who the hell is Bucky?" Later, after Natasha's memories of Bucky have been wiped out and he tries to speak with her, she repeats the line.
  • Kick the Dog: Sin's brutalization of Sharon Carter was definitely this, as was her and Crossbones' crosscountry murder spree prior to it. The way she enjoys watching the possessed Captain America beating up Sharon is far subtler, but certainly also qualifies.
  • Kid Sidekick: Originally, but eventually subverted by the Ed Brubaker Retcon, which revealed him to be handpicked by the Army to accompany Cap and perform wetworks missions. Due to the Marvel Universe's lack of kid sidekicks (Stan Lee has expressed his dislike for the trope), it's led to the interpretation that Bucky was a deconstruction of them by showing that it'd only put a minor in mortal danger. The deconstruction angle went further with Brubaker's retconning him to have been more of a child assassin.
  • Killed Off for Real: Jack Monroe's killed by the Winter Soldier.
  • Knee-capping: This seems to be Bucky's preferred method of dealing with enemy Mooks.
  • Legacy Character:
    • It's revealed that in the event of his death (which happened in Civil War), Steve made two requests of Tony Stark: choose a new Captain America and ensure Bucky doesn't lose himself. Tony misinterpreted that as Steve wanting Bucky to be Cap, and while that wasn't what Steve had in mind, he approved and insisted Bucky keep it, taking over SHIELD as Commander Rogers, up until Bucky faked his death and returned to covert ops as the Winter Soldier.
    • Sin takes up her father's identity as the Red Skull.
  • Lethally Stupid: Throughout the Brubaker run, almost everything that goes wrong with the Skull's plans in this period is due to Sin gleefully juggling the Villain Ball and the Idiot Ball, and she causes a lot of unrelated havoc besides. This arc justifies everything bad he's been saying about her.
  • Love Triangle: Diamondback still has a crush on Captain America, who was seeing Sharon Carter at the time. Being a professional, she kept it to herself.
  • Make Way for the New Villains: Toyed with when the Red Skull was assassinated by the Winter Soldier during the first issue, leading many readers to think the writer was playing this trope straight. Instead, it was revealed that Red Skull had survived inside the body of the Winter Soldier's employer, setting up one of the series' longest running Plot Threads.
  • Male Might, Female Finesse: Bucky and Natasha had this dynamic as a Battle Couple. Bucky had a cybernetic arm and used guns and his shield whereas Natasha was an acrobatic fighter with a Super Wrist-Gadget.
  • Mechanical Muscles: Bucky's bionic arm is shaped to look extremely muscular to match his other arm.
  • Mistaken for Racist: Exploited during the Two Americas arc. Sam poses as a black accountant hassling a local racist so that Bucky can pose as an out-of-town racist to gain their trust.
  • Multi-Ranged Master: Bucky as Captain America, but only because the shield is a Precision-Guided Boomerang. He often uses it in conjunction with his pistol, which may or may not be a heavily modified P08 Luger.
  • Multi-Ranged Master: Bucky is this as Captain America, but only because the shield is a Precision-Guided Boomerang. He often uses it in conjunction with his pistol, which may or may not be a heavily modified P08 Luger.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: This is Bucky's reaction upon getting his memories back.
  • My Greatest Failure: Steve regarded Bucky's supposed death at the end of World War II as this for a long time after his revival in the modern day.
  • My Greatest Second Chance: After finding out of Bucky's survival and freeing the guy from Soviet brainwashing, Steve felt that he should do everything in his power to keep Bucky alive and a good man. This apparently meant persuading Bucky to keep the Captain America mantle even after his own return from the dead.
  • Neuro-Vault: In Bucky's last appearance as Captain America before his supposed second death, it was revealed that the reason why he was extradited to Russia was because he had information on how to locate and activate a team of Deep Cover Agents much like the Winter Soldier subconsciously sealed in his mind, and the warden of his gulag had plans for this information.
  • '90s Anti-Hero: The Winter Soldier story arc subverts a lot of these tropes. When Cap's sidekick Bucky turned out to be Not Quite Dead after all, he was revived as a brainwashed assassin with a cyborg arm; it could have been really stupid, but it wasn't. Then, when Bucky took over as Captain America, he seemed poised to be a Grim and Gritty alternative to the more traditional model, with much made of him carrying a gun — however, Bucky almost never uses the gun, and in fact tries overcome his past and be a more traditional superhero.
  • No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Disregarding how unlikely it is to chance upon an amnesiac soldier well-versed in infiltration, sabotage, and assassination, the sheer amount of money put into enhancing Bucky ensured that creating more than one Winter Soldier wasn't a viable option.
  • Not Quite Dead:
    • When the Russians found Bucky after the missile exploded over the Atlantic, he was clinically dead, but because his body had been submerged in freezing cold water right at the time of death, they attempted to resuscitate him as if his heart had only just stopped. It worked, but he was partially amnesiac: he retained no memories of his life or identity, but he still spoke four languages and had all of his instinctual combat training.
    • Getting stabbed with Sin's hammer left Bucky Only Mostly Dead, and he was later revived through intensive medical care and the use of Nick Fury's Infinity Formula. His death was faked by Black Widow and Fury, who planted an LMD with injuries identical to his, and left it to be buried as a hero in Arlington, absolving him of the charges set against him during his time in prison]].
  • Older Than They Look: Bucky looks barely a day over 25, but he was born almost a hundred years ago. Counting only time he spent out of cryo he'd be in his late thirties.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: James Buchanan Barnes's come down in history as "Bucky", which is half-nickname, half-superhero legacy. Originally, his girlfriend, Black Widow, was the only person who regularly called him "James," but more recent writers are having him known as such because they feel "Bucky" isn't a particularly dignified name for an adult hero.
  • Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Played straight when he was just Cap's sidekick as he was only 5 foot 7 and can hold his own in the war. Somewhat downplayed when he becomes The Winter Soldier, where he grew taller by 2 inches, which is considered fairly average, but he's still shorter than many other superheroes.
  • Red Baron: Nobody knew Bucky by name when he was operating as the Winter Soldier, not even his own Soviet superiors.
  • Redemption Demotion: When Bucky was reintroduced as the Winter Soldier, he was presented as a cold, unerring, and efficient assassin who could eliminate the Red Skull without even batting an eyelash. After regaining his memories and subsequently taking on the Captain America mantle, while he did fairly well, he showed an over-reliance on Indy Ploys and a tendency to end up being saved by his buddies from harm. This makes a certain amount of sense, since the skill-sets of 'assassin' and 'superhero' aren't quite the same - putting a bullet in someone like the Red Skull is easier than taking them in alive.
  • Reimagining the Artifact: The Ed Brubaker retcon basically amounts to this, turning Bucky from a Kid Sidekick to a teenage assassin, bumping his age slightly (he's still too young to be a soldier, but in an era where the military needed bodies enough to overlook that), and saying that Bucky's original origin story — camp mascot who found out Cap's secret identity and had to become his partner — was an official story put out by the military who didn't want to let on to the fact that he was highly-trained in covert ops.
  • Renegade Russian: Aleksander Lukin, CEO of Kronas. The discovery of the Winter Soldier's existence was due to Lukin recommissioning the Soldier after decades of being a Human Popsicle since the end of the Cold War to acquire the Cosmic Cube and enact a plan to use the Cube and Kronas to destroy the American economy from within. He is a protege of the Soviet officer who had Bucky brainwashed in the first place.
  • Retcon:
    • Ed Brubaker's retooling of the Bucky character into a teen assassin, brainwashed into becoming a Soviet agent after secretly surviving World War II, paving the way for his reintroduction into modern day comics is often hailed as one of the most well done Retcons in recent history. His original death in The '60s was a retcon as well, saying that the Captain America and Bucky from The '50s were actually impostors. According to Brubaker, it was when he learned that this oft-flashbacked-to death was just a retcon that he determined that, if he ever got to write Captain America comics, he'd undo it.
    • The presence of Bucky, a Kid Sidekick in World War II, is awkward to explain, as the US Military would never tolerate a child going into combat with Cap. Ed Brubaker retconned this by slightly aging up Bucky and explaining he was trained to do covert operations that Captain America couldn't be seen doing.
  • Rescue Romance: A very twisted villainous version happens in the series. Sin, the Red Skull’s daughter was captured by SHIELD and held in a facility where she was subjected to Heel–Face Brainwashing to turn her into a normal, well-adjusted All American girl. Skull’s Dragon Crossbones fought his way into the facility, abducted her and fought his way back out (killing dozens of Red Shirts in the process), then imprisoned and tortured her until her true memories and personality were restored. Then they fell in love. To an outside observer, this was all horrifying but from their perspective, he had rescued her from enemy captivity and freed her from nefarious mind control.
  • Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: This trope is also the driving force for Cap rejecting the Superhuman Registration Act, as he leads a contingent of heroes who don't approve of the Act.
  • Sealed Badass in a Can: The reason why Bucky's so youthful is because the Soviets kept him in suspended animation while he wasn't out on missions.
  • Sharing a Body: Around the time of Civil War, the Red Skull was assassinated by Aleksander Lukin, a former Soviet general. Due to shenanigans with a weak Cosmic Cube Red Skull possessed, an attempt at Grand Theft Me became this trope instead, made all the worse for both because of their fierce ideological opposition to the other.
  • Shrouded in Myth: The Winter Soldier was long assumed to be just a myth.
  • Sidekick Graduations Stick: Despite Steve coming Back from the Dead again, Bucky continued to serve as Captain America, with the approval of the man himself. Not anymore though, Steve's Cap again.
  • Someone to Remember Him By: Sharon discovered she was pregnant thanks to Captain America, just following his death in Civil War.
  • Split-Personality Takeover: A nightmarish example in issue #15. S.H.I.E.L.D. had brainwashed Sin into believing she was the innocent Nice Girl Erica Holstein, who then got kidnapped by Crossbones and forcibly deprogrammed. You could argue it was wrong to "change" Sin that way, that "Erica" was a lie and that she should be given back "her own" life, and her friends and family were certainly glad to have her back, but it's absolutely horrible to read from "Erica's" POV how she's first tortured and abused by a maniac, and then slowly begins to realize that she is, for all intents and purposes, dying, and soon she'll be another person, with a monster wearing her face.
  • Spontaneous Human Combustion: The Man with No Face and his boss Professor Zhang Chin seek to solve human overpopulation by turning the original Human Torch's cells into a plague that causes this.
  • Status Quo Is God: Pretty much the reason why Bucky faked his death and went back to the Winter Soldier codename. It was all so Steve could return to his original role as Captain America to coincide with the 2011 movie.
  • Superhero Packing Heat: Justified as Bucky's a thoroughly unpowered — though in good shape and well trained — hero going against Cap's still-powered rogues gallery.
  • The Atoner: What Bucky decides to be after coming to terms with what he's done under Soviet brainwashing.
  • The Bus Came Back: The Man with No Face returns in 2008 to fight the Bucky Barnes Captain America.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Thanks to Ed Brubaker, Bucky's gone a long way from being one of the most laughable examples of a Kid Sidekick ever. How long? He became Captain America.
  • Unexplained Recovery: Captain America And The Falcon had an ongoing subplot about Sam coming unhinged because of Scarlet Witch's manipulations during Avengers Disassembled. Sam's mental state gradually got worse before he seemingly snapped out of it, and he was last seen confronting Anti-Cap. The series abruptly ended the next issue, with the final few pages showing Cap finding Sam's abandoned Falcon suit in a graveyard, ominously fluttering in the wind. This, coupled with Anti-Cap claiming to have killed Sam, was clearly meant to make his fate ambiguous. When Sam returned a few months later in Ed Brubaker's series, there was no mention of his prior disappearance or what exactly Anti-Cap had done to him.
  • A True Story in My Universe: The series presents the Golden Age comics as an in-universe fictionalized version of the "true story", meant to bolster morale among civilians. Bucky lampshades it at one point while looking through one of the comic books.
    Bucky: What am I supposed to be here, eight?
  • Weak, but Skilled: Aside from his cybernetic arm, Bucky doesn't have much in the way of superhuman abilities, but he still manages to hold his own quite well against powered opponents, owing to his Combat Pragmatist tendencies and skill set.
  • Wham Line: This is used to reveal Bucky's memory loss as the Winter Soldier:
    Captain America: ...Bucky?
    The Winter Soldier: ...Who the hell is Bucky?

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