Super Soldier

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. This week, we’re looking at five of Cap’s most memorable team-ups that don’t involve the people he hangs around all the time in the Avengers or his famous partnerships with characters like Bucky, Sharon Carter, and the Falcon.

Q: I found Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD in a box of 50-cent comics. Great idea or terrible one? Fun new direction or misread of the character? -- @Keith_Frady A: Oh, that one was a great idea, but not for the reasons you might think. See, Keith, what you have stumbled across is neither a misread of the character nor is it a bold new direction. You've just found yourself a piece of the Amalgam Age of Comics. Originally published in 1996 and 1997, the Amalgam books were quite possibly the strangest mainstream superhero project that ever happened: A not-quite-series of 24 comics that mashed up Marvel and DC characters into weirdly amalgamated versions that were actually produced by Marvel and DC, and that frequently made absolutely no sense at all. And, as you might expect from the fact that this all happened when I was 14, I loved it.

I think the intuition/thought process of buying cheap comics is interesting. There's a combination of randomness, curatorial sense and instinct at play. You end up with a group of comics that would ordinarily never be linked together, from different times, artists and publishers, but links and common themes are there and just need to be unearthed. You end up with a vantage point on the artform you