The first episode of Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuted at Disney + on Friday, giving hungry Marvel movie fans a chance to catch up with Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes and the federal government’s institutionalized pattern of racism. It was a lot of fun, but one person who would like everyone to stop asking about it is the talented comic book writer Ed Brubaker – also known as the Winter Soldier co-creator. Brubaker was the writer of the phenomenal captain America command Cap’s reintroduced fellow in World War II, Bucky Barnes, as a brainwashed Soviet assassin with a robotic arm (along with artist Steve Epting), so it stands to reason that people would be eager to know what he thinks now that Bucky is the co-star of a major TV show, but Brubaker said he has “mixed feelings” about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier at the a recent newsletter (through Variety)
Brubaker makes a point of saying that everyone he interacted with at Marvel Studios (“since Kevin Feige”) was “nothing but kind”, but he says that he and Epting almost always received a “thank you” here or there “to create a character and a storyline that has become a central building block of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That said, Brubaker acknowledges that he knew this was the business when he agreed to work for Marvel Comics, saying “hired work is what it is”, and he also notes that he is “thrilled” to see something he has become a big part of pop culture (he also seems to love Sebastian Stan’s Bucky, who he says is “perfect”), but everything has still “become increasingly difficult to live with ” over the years.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has historically been very good at at least recognizing the comic book writers who laid the foundation for their stories, both in credits and in cameos (Brubaker appears in Captain America: The Winter Soldier during one of Bucky’s brainwashing sequences), but this is not the first time a writer has mentioned the fact that these things don’t necessarily translate into, you know, cash.
For example, The Infinity Gauntlet writer Jim Starlin had a cameo in Avengers: Endgame, but he also posted on Facebook years ago that he had received a “big check” from DC Entertainment because they used his character, The KGBeast, in a scene from Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (where he doesn’t use that name and looks nothing like the comic book character), with the check apparently being “much bigger” than anything he had gotten from Marvel Studios at the time – despite having created or co- created Thanos, Drax and Gamora. Basically, don’t assume that these big corporations are giving money to people they don’t have a legal obligation to give money to, it’s good to find ways to directly support the artists you care about.