Comic review: Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #7- Inside the mind of a traumatised boy soldier

Writer: Ales Kot
Artist: Langdon Foss
Cover Artist: Michael Del Mundo
Publisher: Marvel (Disney)
Released: 8th April 2015


I purchased this book because of the creatively rendered front-cover. The actual content of the book, the writer, the artist, the characters involved etc, were not a factor. I bought it for the cover, thinking it would look nice on my wall, and it will, but what about the actual content of the book?

Looking at the first page, a page that featured a childishly drawn image of Crossbones with a bloody knife, I was immediately disappointed. I’ll put up the image in this review so you can see it for yourself. What do you think?

Here’s what I think. It reminds me of the kind of sketch that you’d expect to find in the back of a bored school-kid’s maths book, that’s what it looks like to me. Basic, big muscles, blood, skull, knife, guns, corpses littered around ‘awesome’ bad guy. In other words, it’s as naff as Hell, a twelve-year-olds embarrassing first attempt at doing something ‘cool’ to impress his friends.

I was worried (understandably, right?) that this book with a great cover would turn out to be a load of junk, so I read on with a sinking feeling, expecting the worst and thinking about better comic books that I could read after finishing this one. I kept reading, and to my great surprise I managed to get something out of this book, and I can even find a reason to justify the childish art as well.

Here’s the reason. The book is coming from the point of view of a villain. That villain (Crossbones) is a traumatised, over-grown little boy with parental abandonment issues. He has been hurt, so he wants to hurt other people in return. He bought into the lie peddled by his father that soldiers and cops fight for freedom and peace, and when the lie was exposed and reality kicked him in the pants he reacted in exactly the same way as other little boys react when their world view is shattered. Rather than fighting against the order following, immoral institutions that make the world/galaxy what it is, he blamed life itself. Hating himself, everything and everybody he did what all secondary psychopaths do, he lashed out at the world with violence, attempting to put ‘order’ on what to him seemed like random acts of chaos.

People like this usually become Policemen or soldiers, or politicians, or other cogs in the new world order machine of inhumanity, order following and control, but seeing as this is a comic book about a super villain, this traumatised little boy of an order following absent father became a hate filled super villain instead.

What writer Ales Kot has done here is to show the making of a soldier. Crossbones is a control freak who wants to punish people, wants to hurt people, and wants to get revenge for the trauma that he has been through. If he were an Afghani villager who had experienced a childhood of watching the death and horror of US drone strikes he’s join the Taliban, or ISIS, or Al Qaeda. If he was a young boy living in America who had been traumatised by what happened on 9/11 then he would have joined the US military and happily gone off to Iraq to help the banks and corporations rape, loot and burn that country.

That’s how soldiers are made. They are grown-up, traumatised children, not just in the west, but everywhere in the world. You can put on a uniform, or not, but when you join up and join the machine of violence you are doing it because you are lashing out at the world. You hate the world, you have given up on the world, you feel little, powerless, small, and you want to punch somebody in the face. You pick up a gun and start shooting back, and violence continues, the elite’s continue to use your hatred and the world keeps on repeating forever, and ever.

This book should have been subtitled’ How to create a soldier,’ because that’s what it’s really about.

The basic, childlike artwork is perfect for the book, as it’s simplified, making violence look childishly cool, bringing you straight into the mind of the traumatised child soldier.

I didn’t like the art, but it really works here, and whether or not that was intentional doesn’t really matter, as the end result is a book that makes a very good point about the world, how it is today, and how it will always be unless a childish mindset of order following, trauma and revenge is dealt with by critically aware, thinking, analysing, questioning adults.

The powers that shouldn’t be around the world rely on traumatised children to keep the wheels of their war machines turning. If we are ever going to change the world and make it the peaceful, co-operative place that it should be then one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today is to understand the mind-set of the traumatised children that the control systems use to keep their machine running.

How do we do that? We talk to children open, and honestly. We teach them that order following is evil, and that if you put on the uniform of the state you are essentially giving away moral responsibility for the immoral consequences of your own actions. When you do this the end result is slavery for everybody, and the rule of the planet by a tiny number of psychopathic elite families. That’s the lesson, and I thank Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #7 for illustrating the mindset of a traumatised child, a mindset that has to be acknowledged, then dealt with, if anything resembling peace is ever to have a chance on planet earth, a planet full to the brim with traumatised children, and with archonic, satanic families clamped upon humanity like a giant, vampiric, blood sucking leach, exploiting trauma they divide and conquer, and end up ruling us all.



Rating: 7/10 (There’s a lesson to be learnt in this book, but how many people will see it?)