Captain Carter #3 - Marvel Comics

CAPTAIN CARTER No. 3, July 2022

Supposedly needing to use the guest appearance of Iron Man as a solicitation selling-point, Jamie McKelvie’s storyline for Issue Three of “Captain Carter” also regrettably seems to rely upon a few too many contrivances in order to schedule its series of sense-shattering set-pieces. In fact, for those bookworms who dislike supposed top-tier secret operatives dropping their S.T.R.I.K.E. insignia-carrying handguns at the scene of a botched assassination, and billionaire industrialists just happening to travel over four thousand miles across the planet’s surface on the off chance of bumping into someone their grandfather worked with decades earlier, the American author’s twenty-page plot is arguably going to prove rather problematic to wade through.

Foremost of these manufactured moments must be the sudden ability of Peggy’s neighbour, Harley Davis, to easily hack into the British Government’s highest top secret computer system with a simple bootable zip drive and the wireless technology of a Bluetooth phone. The Brixton-based friend appears incredibly knowledgeable about accessing encrypted data records, weapon deployment archives and voicemails, to the point where she conveniently discovers within minutes that the British Prime Minister himself has verbally ordered the treacherous hit on the "woman out of time" and her comrade-in-arms, Lizzie Braddock.

Admittedly, all these happy happenstances certainly provide the Pennsylvanian-born writer’s narrative with some nail-biting pace as the titular character tackles a foreboding band of battle-hardened government agents and the infamous London traffic, in a desperate bid to detain some mysterious blonde-haired woman. But it is debatably hard to maintain a person’s willing suspension of disbelief when so many coincidences occur one after the other, even to the point where Chief Hunter luckily decides to suddenly eat his food outside as “it’s a lovely day” to provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for his personal workstation to be hacked.

Heroically pencilling all these implausibilities is Marika Cresta, who does a sterling job in providing plenty of jaw-breaking “Thwck” and “Krunk” to the super-powered cast’s battering blows. The Ringo Awards-nominee does an especially fine job of illustrating Captain Carter’s intense punch-up in Briefing Room 3, where the tightly confined fighting space is impressively depicted through a series of thin, page-wide panels showing Peggy being slowly outnumbered; “I’ll pop my head in to make my excuses, then leave. Have to get that zip drive out of Hunter’s computer before he gets back from lunch.”

The regular cover art of "CAPTAIN CARTER" #3 by Jamie McKelvie