Okay, real talk: this has the potential to be the best Cap run since at least Brubaker, and the first to really get to the core of the character (both of the symbol Captain America and of the man wearing the costume, and how those intersect) since The Captain storyline back in the late 80s. We're only one book in, of course, and this assumes it keeps up this level of storytelling, which is far from certain, but one can hope.

I mention The Captain because it's treading some similar ground, albeit in different ways. In that storyline, Steve Rogers was on the outs with SHIELD for reasons and was being pressured to give up the Captain America role because of a PR issue, and also because there was a conspiracy within the government; but that's neither here nor there. That latter bit was kind of standard superhero stuff for the time. The main theme that ran through the story was about standing up for what was right, even as those he thought were allies turned against him. It was a very basic stripping down of what Captain America stands for, because ultimately he stands for the people, even when their government turns against him; hell, even when a lot of the people turn against him.

Even outside of the main theme of the story, there are a lot of nods to that fairly classic period: the return of D-Man as a part of Cap's support team (and the return of an independent support team in general), a lack of resources forcing personal resourcefulness, a hotline for regular folks to report issues to Cap and his team to look into, clashing with a right wing group that tries to enforce their will on others over an issue of the day (the Sons here about immigration, the Watchdogs over issues of morality, both with heavy undertones of racism brought into sharper focus by having Sam in the costume), and on and on.

Every 10 to 15 years, the main Cap comic tries to tell a story about Cap turning against or being turned against by the government, and most of them are noble failures. Sometimes you get something great like The Captain, sometimes the more muddled stuff around Civil War or the kind of laughable Nomad period. I was not a big fan of FalCap at first, both because I didn't like it from a conceptual standpoint (becoming Cap didn't feel like Sam "graduating to the big leagues" as much as him losing his own identity) and an execution standpoint (the first year of FalCap-related stories seemed to be casting around trying to figure out what it wanted to say). But this first issue has completely got me on board, if Spencer keeps going down this road.