Talking with the writer behind the new Captain America.

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If you've been following the news, then you probably know two things: 1) There's a new Captain America, and 2) he's carrying a gun.As to the first point, the original Cap (Steve Rogers) is still dead, assassinated last year by the Red Skull's operatives. The new guy is former sidekick Bucky Barnes, who was believed KIA in 1945, but was really captured by the Soviets. They kept him cryogenically frozen, only thawing him out occasionally to operate as a brainwashed assassin called The Winter Soldier. The results of this unpleasant second career are, among other things, a prosthetic arm, an unnaturally extended lifespan (he's still in his 20s) and some awful stuff on his conscience.That second part is hard to miss, too, as media outlets like Newsday, the Associated Press, NPR's "Morning Edition," BostonNow.com and even "The Colbert Report" have made a point of it. Plus, it's caused something of a firestorm in the blogosphere, where anxiety about the "symbolism" is rampant. Captain America with a firearm? Oh, the humanity!Which, to me, is just silly. I never bought the idea (introduced in the 1980s, by the way) that Captain America would never kill a bad guy. For one thing, the no-gun thing is Batman's bag, and the code against killing is Superman's. Why should any of that extend to a supersoldier? But there are many other good reasons, and "Captain America" writer Ed Brubaker articulated them best in a phone interview:-- This is not Steve Rogers: "When we came up with the new look, none of us ... blinked at the idea of giving (the new Cap) a gun, because we all knew it was Bucky. And Bucky's always had a gun! ... You look at what was shown in the '40s: Bucky with a flamethrower, Bucky with a shotgun, Bucky with a machine gun, Bucky with any kind of weapon he can get his hands on, wasting" the Nazis and the Japanese.-- Captain America is a soldier: "It's like this urban legend that Cap never carried a weapon or never used weapons or somehow hated weapons. He was a soldier in WWII for five years and I'm sure he saw or did things he isn't proud of. ... Because, you know, if the government's going to create a supersoldier, he'd darn well better be able to take out the enemy! Instead of walking up and shaking hands with everybody ... I really (think) the character (shouldn't) have a problem killing terrorists."-- On those who say being strapped makes Cap appear bloodthirsty: "I think that's insulting to every peace officer and soldier in the world."-- Weapons are nothing new: "Cap's always had a utility belt, anyway. I think only once have I ever had him pull anything out of it and use it. I always knew what was in it, if he needed to use it. But I just never had room for him to whip out a smoke grenade or whatever in the book."-- It's a genre convention: "Superheroes grew out of pulp fiction, and you'd be hard-pressed to find any episode of Doc Savage or The Shadow where half a dozen people didn't get wasted by the good guys. That's what the pulps were. And I love that aspect of superhero comics, and I think we got away from that at some point in the '80s, and I've tried to re-embrace that with everything I've written for the genre, to give it that kind of pulp aspect."-- It's just a story: "One thing that people forget is that you don't write an icon, you write a comic book. You write the character. ... An icon doesn't have a story, and if it does, it's really, really boring."I'm writing Steve Rogers, I'm writing Bucky Barnes, I'm writing these people as characters in an epic espionage story. To me, saying Cap can't have a gun is like saying James Bond can't blow up everything."Which is explanation enough for me. Gun or no gun, I think Brubaker's "Captain America" -- he's been writing it since 2005 -- is one of the best on the market. It gleefully mixes spies and superheroics, and boasts a well-developed ensemble cast. And now it has a title character in desperate need of redemption ... and maybe a little revenge.If I were the Red Skull, that pistol would be the least of my worries.(Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics(at)aol.com or visit www.captaincomics.us.)