Now this is interesting.  Never mind that Vietnam Cap is decked out like nuke, never mind the village of superpowered rural folk or even the Apocalypse Now allusions.  This battle of minds and beliefs between the WW2 Cap and Vietnam Cap have set this series apart from the flock.  Having captured Steve Rogers in issue 2 Nam Cap doesn't kill him, he attempts to explain his own disillusionment with the US establishment and turn Steve to his side.  He begins educating Steve first about the sins of the Nixon administration right through the 80s and 90s, on to the failures in Darfur and the moral compromises of the war on terror.

It's a superhero story still, with brief flashes of action, particularly as Cap tries to escape the village.  There's even a cliffhanger set up to the final issue, that leaves you curious to see where things end up, but it's the psychological hook that Aaron has focussed upon that makes this worth the read.  I found it fascinating that while Nam Cap is ruthless and murderous, his point of view has a liberalism and realistic outlook that the Ultimate Steve Rogers has never shown.  On the flip side, Rogers is conservative and even narrowminded, yet has that old fashioned decency and determination to follow a certain code of honour.  However where Rogers spent 50 years sleeping through the degradation of the American Dream, Nam Cap lived through every minute of it leading quite naturally to the place he finds himself now.

Like Hickman's recent Thor series this book is turning out to be a really interesting experiment.  Given an arena in which there's no substantial continuity to bind them (the Ultimates publishing history being on nothing near the scale of Ultimate Spider-man), Aaron and Hickman have both zeroed in on some unique facets of their chosen characters, and really given us something new to chew on.  Throw that together in this case with some sumptuous, angular, almost sketchy Ron Garney pencil work and you've got something that's both a rivetting, entertaining read but also a story with plenty to say.