Captain America: The Bloodstone Hunt

Not only is it the week of my 30th birthday, but the new Captain America movie comes out! To celebrate Cap’s debut (or return if you want to count the Matt Salinger film), expect a whole lot of Captain America this week.

We start off with The Bloodstone Hunt by Mark Gruenwald and Kieron Dwyer. It was the summer of 1989 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had just come out. It’s only appropriate that the summer’s big Cap story was  an Indy style epic.

The plot is very straight forward. Baron Zemo is trying to recover all the shards of the mystical Bloodstone so he can bring his father back to life. He’s employed Batroc the Leaper, Zaran and Machete to help him. Obviously Captain America can’t allow this to happen, and he’s joined by the former villainous Diamondback (who seems to have a hankering for some make-out time with the good Captain) to stop them.

The story is all over the world, with them fighting snakes, sharks, ninjas and samurai’s, a tribe of cannibals and even a cult. With all the accents of the villains, letterer John Morelli must have had one heck of a headache. As for the story, its pretty light and quick-moving. It’s not a deep story and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a fun popcorn-flick type plot.

There were two really odd things in the story. At one point, Cap and Diamondback track a Bloodstone piece into a cave, where they find it in the posession of a mummy that is wandering around and wants to kill them. However, since Cap is so swell, he talks the mummy into letting them borrow it and all is forgiven. At the end of the story, the mummy is nowhere to be found. I want to know what happened to the mummy.

The other weird thing is Diamondback’s costume. The story takes place over the course of a couple of days and her outfit keeps getting more and more shredded from all the fighting and environmental dangers. Don’t believe me? Check out the picture above. None of the men had this problem. Diamondback should really stop buying cheaply made clothes.

The story also introduces the villainous mercenary Crossbones, who is trying to collect a bounty on Cap placed by the Red Skull. As part of his plot, Crossbones kidnaps Diamondback as bait. Things only get worse for our purple-and-pink clad heroine, as Crossbones has dropped her off at a brothel for safe keeping and its other employees want to force her into becoming a working woman there. What an awful couple issues for Diamondback.

Lucky for her, she’s Cap’s gal and he always saves the day. This is a fun story. Like I said, it’s not very serious and its a quick read. It’s best served with a trenta Iced Mocha from Starbucks.