“The thing that has people so up in arms is that the two story-lines are in so close a proximity to each other.

“There’s no such thing as a truly original idea,” says Vito Delsante, manager at Jim Hanley’s Universe, a comic store in Midtown Manhattan, and himself a professional comic book writer. “The minute I heard there were comparisons being made, I made an effort to steer clear of reading his Batman stuff or even finishing Final Crisis, since I’d heard we were treading some of the same ground.”īrubaker was quick to add that he will eventually read Morrison’s complete run on Batman down the road, just because he’s a fan of the Scottish scribe. “I’m positive that Grant Morrison and I arrived at our stories without any knowledge of the other one,” Brubaker told Unwinnable by email.

A few months later, Marvel launched Captain America: Reborn, a series that revealed the big mystery behind the star spangled hero’s demise: it turns out he wasn’t dead either, just zapped back into time. It turns out Bruce Wayne was merely zapped into the past and would eventually return. Was DC copying the Captain?Īfter Batman’s “death” there was a teaser shot of a shadowy figure painting a bat symbol on a cave wall during prehistoric times. After a relatively short Battle for the Cowl, his ex-sidekick, Dick Grayson, aka Robin, aka Nightwing, became the new Batman. Meanwhile over in Gotham City, Batman seemed to be obliterated by Darkseid (and his henchman, writer Grant Morrison) in January 2009. About a year later, writer Ed Brubaker gave Cap’s former sidekick Bucky Barnes the shield to become the new Captain America. How else to explain how over the past few years the storylines of the Caped Crusader and Captain America have eerily mirrored each other in the pages of their comic titles, despite the fact that they are published by arch-rivals DC and Marvel respectively?įor those of you not loitering in comic book stores every Wednesday, Captain America “died” in March 2007, a shocker broken by this reporter in the New York Daily News with the fanfare usually reserved for real political assassinations.

Captain America by Ed Brubaker