Captain Carter #4 - Marvel Comics

CAPTAIN CARTER No. 4, September 2022

Initially grabbing its audience by the scruff of the neck with a no-nonsense punch-up between Peggy Carter, an armourless Iron Man and a veritable vanload of super-powered goons, Jamie McKelvie’s script for Issue Four of “Captain Carter” certainly gets off to a sense-shattering start. But whilst this fistfight genuinely projects an air of potential deadliness for the titular character and her conveniently tech-savvy fighting companion, the rest of the twenty-page periodical’s plot is probably a bit disappointingly pedestrian; “I’ll go with you, Tony. I can’t just sit here being useless.”

Indeed, it’s arguably not until this comic’s cliff-hanger of a conclusion that any reader’s pulse will start pounding again, and then it’s only because the lead protagonist is acting so naively that anyone can see she’s about to be captured by the mini-series’ central villain so are screaming at the “decades-old spy” to stop her solo assassination mission before it’s too late. This situation is doubly infuriating because it comes straight after an extremely well-written sequence where Peggy suddenly pieces together all the clues which the author has previously dropped that the Prime Minister is actually the vampire Lord John Falsworth.

Perhaps this publication’s biggest problem though is just how increasingly insufferable and holier than thou Harley Davis appears throughout the story. Not happy simply having the disagreeable young woman completely tear apart the British Intelligence Service’s most top-secret data files concerning the head of government’s fraudulent background using just a home computer, McKelvie also has her taking Lizzie Braddock to task for not having grown up poor and then suggests despite all the secret agent’s evident hard work, that she only got her position within S.T.R.I.K.E. solely because her father “was the Director General of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s British Division.” In fact, the Brixton-based music streamer even gets the telekinetic to apologise to her for having had a privileged upbringing.

Equally as inconsistent as this book’s penmanship is sadly Marika Cresta’s layouts. The Ringo Award-nominee does a terrific job pencilling Captain Carter’s epic battle against a heavily muscled blood-drinking thrall. Yet seemingly struggles to add anything to the subsequent dialogue-driven scenes, even when one of them ends with a friend of Stark’s killing himself by stepping off the top of a high-rise building.

The regular cover art of "CAPTAIN CARTER" #4 by Jamie McKelvie