All New Captain America 2 page 13 by Stuart Immonen & Wade Von Grawbadger

Stuart Immonen (with Wade) may be (one of?) the best modern storyteller(s)s in the industry (worldwide?) nowadays and there is no discussion possible that his Cap & X-Men work represented YET another plateau he reached to establish his crown.

This page is just pure intensity. A scene we have all seen so many times in movies. The hero and the villain facing off to a standstill where just the little nudge means one side wins.

But I find the storytelling exceptional here in the sense that despite the urgency, the tension, time stands still for a deadly moment on this page.

The first panel serves to establish the gravity of the scene. The point of the knife is already digging inside the lenses of the googles.

Yet FalCap finds strength in himself to reach for his gun in panels 2 and 3. The standstill is achieved.

However, Crossbones does not care for the gun nor for his death. Only for FalCap’s. That is well established in the fourth panel but the fifth really gives you, dear reader, the impression that you are looking directly in death’s eyes. Imagine poor Cap.

They also halt time within the scene for us and Cap to contemplate what he is facing.

Those fourth and fifth panels are simply exceptional. Perfection even (imho).

I never paid much attention to Crossbones before Brubaker’s run but I don’t think that he has looked as dangerous as under Immonen’s pencils.

Let’s not forget to mention the fantastic use of light (again, Crossbones drenched in shadow makes for such efficient imagery to convey his dangerousness) and those razor sharp inks, full of tiny cross hatching lines.