As I whined about mentioned one or two times, German translations of American comics are usually one or two years behind. On the other hand, they tend to come in trade collections and aren't as expensive as the originals tend to be, which is nifty. So yesterday I was able to read something completely why I had only read two or so issues of before (grabbed during visits to the UK): Ed Brubaker's Captain America: Death of a Dream and Captain America: The Burden of Dreams, which, Blake's 7 fan that I am, I am irresistably tempted to call "Brubaker pulls a Blake". Explanation: after the first two seasons of B7, Gareth Thomas, the actor who played the titular character, Blake, went back to the RSC and hence left the show (though he was available for two guest appearances in the s3 and s4 finale respectively). This led among other things to everyone's favourite ambiguous character, Avon, promoted to leading man for the later two season, which in turn did, err, interesting things with Avon's characterisation, but that's another matter. The show, however, remained called Blake's 7, and you could say that Blake in absentia had a far more powerful hold over Avon than Blake present. My point of comparison being that Brubaker had to pull off writing a title with the title character gone due to the end of the big Civil War crossover event, and to eventually promote one of the supporting characters to his place. This he did with style; it's also a really well written aftermath of loss, experienced differently by the various characters in the comic (to wit, Sam aka Falcon, Bucky Barnes, Sharon Carter and Tony Stark; admittedly it was the Tony angle that made me read the story in the first place, after reading Brubaker's Winter Soldier, Aka The One Where Bucky Comes Back, first, but he's by no means the only reason why I can recommend the story). I have two complaints, more praise, and some irreverence beneath the cut.

( A Greek chorus, muttering  )