Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #1 Review

WARNING: Spoilers for Marvel‘s Original Sin storyline!

In The events of Marvel’s Original Sin story arc, Bucky Barnes takes over Nick Fury’s position as intergalactic assassin. Barnes’ new job means that he is Earth’s protector against alien threats before they reach the Earth. It’s a far more proactive approach than the rest of Earth’s heroes.

Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #1 doesn’t have any lead up in the plot since it was all explained in Original Sin. The comic picks up with Barnes already in deep on a mission. He is on a strange planet with a mission; to kill one of its leaders. After the mission is completed, the reader is taken to another location in the galaxy where Barnes enjoys his downtime. After that, it’s back to Earth for another mission with a familiar hero to help him out this time. His mission on Earth (which seems mundane compared to his current role) is to stop some high profile drug dealers. Barnes, however, uncovers that the middle-man is a very well-known villain, a link that he is not expecting.

As with many first issues, many different plotlines are started at once. The same goes for Winter Soldier as we are shown what Barnes does on a regular basis, one ally gets revealed, a potentially powerful enemy and another mysterious set of characters with some powerful abilities.

The writing in this issue is very good, having been done by Ales Kot (Secret Avengers, Zero). The dialogue is well-structured but Barnes’ internal dialogue is where the writing really shines. The artwork in the book is not your standard comic art, but that’s to be expected with Marco Rudy with his abilities to change his style from comic to comic. Every panels art is painted which usually looks really great, but some panels can be very confusing to look at and it makes the dialogue hard to follow sometimes.

Despite the occasional slip ups with the artwork, this is a great first issue to start the series off. It sets the tone of what you can expect going forward and the Kot has also begun to set up some storylines that have a fantastic potential.