The best part of this collection is the fact there is an extended scene in which Bucky, shirtless, is forced to fight a brown bear while imprisoned in a gulag. I mean, this asks you to buy that there are gulags in contemporary Russia, and that Steve Rogers would be okay with leaving a friend of his in a forced labour camp because to do otherwise would be to start an international diplomatic incident (this is Steve Rogers! Have you met him?), but you know: Bucky wrestles a bear! The filler short stories at the end range from the mediocre to the confusing to the deeply weird—there was one bizarre one that featured a clone of Adolf Hitler that made me just want to back away slowly from whoever wrote it. ( )

Bucky Barnes has gone through a lot and now he's paying for some of his time spent as a cold war assassin, now he's in a soviet gulag, with some of the people he put there, pitted against them in games of pit fighting. As his burried memories of his time as an assassin start to resurface no-one is sure which Bucky will come back from the fray.

Entertaining, a variety of artists and a few shorts afterwards. ( )