Bucky Barnes

• 1. Introduction

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  Bucky Barnes is a Marvel Comics hero whose fans once turned his death into a rule of the genre. The saying went that in comics, "No one stays dead except Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben." For many years, Bucky was the first name on that list. He began as a teenage sidekick to Captain America, vanished in a wartime explosion, and stayed gone while other heroes died and returned. Then he came back under a different name, and the man who returned was not the boy who left. This documentary asks why Marvel's writers left him dead so long. It asks who brought him back, and what he became afterward. It also asks how a character from 1941 ended up carrying the most famous shield in comics, and then walking onto movie screens.

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• 2. Many Buckys

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  In 1940, Joe Simon sketched an early Captain America for Timely Comics and gave the hero a young companion. Simon wrote in his autobiography that he named the boy after his friend Bucky Pierson, a star of their high school basketball team. Simon and Jack Kirby created the character, and Bucky Barnes debuted in Captain America Comics #1, cover-dated March 1941.

  For the next several years Bucky appeared beside Captain America in almost every story. He also joined the Young Allies, an all-kid team. After the war, with superheroes losing popularity, he appeared in the two published adventures of the All-Winners Squad, in All Winners Comics #19 and #21. There was no issue #20.

  In April 1948, Captain America Comics #66 showed Bucky shot and badly wounded. Captain America's girlfriend Betsy Ross took his place as a hero called Golden Girl. Bucky recovered and rejoined Captain America briefly in issue #71, dated March 1949. The series then ended with issue #75 in February 1950, after two issues retitled Captain America's Weird Tales. The final issue was a horror and suspense anthology with no superheroes at all.

  In December 1953, Atlas Comics, Marvel's 1950s incarnation, revived both heroes in Young Men #24. The Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner returned in the same issue. The cover billed Captain America as "Captain America, Commie Smasher!" Bucky appeared in stories across the following year, including three issues that continued the old Captain America numbering. Sales were poor, and the series was discontinued with issue #78 in September 1954.

  A later writer had to explain the odd gaps in Bucky's age. The Avengers #4, from March 1964, established that Captain America and Bucky had gone missing near the end of World War II. According to that story, President Harry S. Truman secretly replaced them with successors using the same identities. That meant the Bucky who fought alongside the All-Winners Squad and then took a bullet was a different young man. Later comics named him Fred Davis, a teenager who had befriended Bucky Barnes before the war ended.

  The 1950s Bucky was explained as Jack Monroe, a college student inspired by the original pair. In the 1980s, Monroe took the name Nomad. Steve Rogers had briefly used that alias in the 1970s, when he was disillusioned with the government and with the role of Captain America.

  Meanwhile, the real Bucky survived in flashback stories. Tales of Suspense #63-71, published from March to November 1965, retold his wartime adventures with Captain America and revised details for the Marvel Universe. After that, he mostly appeared in dreams and memories that haunted Steve Rogers, who felt guilty for failing to save him. In the 1960s, Rick Jones briefly wore the costume and name of Bucky as a modern sidekick.

  The 1980s brought one more borrowed identity. After Steve Rogers stepped down, John Walker became Captain America, and his friend Lamar Hoskins took the name Bucky. Lamar changed it to Battlestar once someone pointed out that "buck" has been used as a slur against Black men in parts of America.

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• 3. Camp Lehigh Mascot

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  Shelbyville, Indiana, is where the comics place the birth of James Buchanan Barnes Jr., in 1925. He grew up as an Army brat alongside his younger sister Rebecca, called Becca. Their mother, Winnifred, died while both children were still small.

  In 1938, their father, James Barnes Sr., was killed during a training exercise at U.S. Army Camp Lehigh in Virginia. A colleague of their father, Major Samson, adopted both children. Becca went off to boarding school, but Bucky stayed on the base and became its unofficial mascot. As a teenager he ran a side business smuggling goods into camp for the soldiers. Training alongside them, he showed a natural talent for marksmanship and hand-to-hand fighting.

  In 1941, Bucky met Steve Rogers at Camp Lehigh. Newspapers and radio were buzzing about a mysterious hero called Captain America, a man transformed into a super-soldier by a serum and technology developed by Abraham Erskine. Bucky walked into Steve's quarters by accident and discovered his secret identity. Rather than silence him, Steve recruited him as a partner and trained him personally. Together they joined the Invaders, a team that also included Namor, the android Human Torch, and Toro.

  The Red Skull then captured the Invaders and hypnotized them into serving the Nazis. Only Bucky escaped. He sought help from Jeff Mace, a new masked hero called Patriot, and the pair broadcast a call to America's crime-fighters. Several answered, and the Liberty Legion formed under Bucky and Mace.

  The Red Skull answered by sending his hypnotized Invaders against the new team. To hide his own movements, Bucky asked Fred Davis, a batboy for the New York Yankees, to wear his costume and pose as him. Once the Invaders were freed from hypnotic control, they returned to the European theatre with Bucky. The Liberty Legion stayed in the United States as the home front team, and the two groups agreed to aid each other whenever needed.

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• 4. Frozen Assassin

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  In the closing days of World War II in 1945, Bucky and Captain America found Heinrich Zemo trying to destroy an experimental Allied drone plane. Zemo launched the aircraft with an armed explosive on board, and both heroes jumped aboard. Captain America fell from the plane and dropped toward the Arctic Circle. Bucky tried and failed to defuse the bomb, and it exploded in mid-air before reaching its target.

  Both men vanished from public view and were presumed dead. In truth, Rogers was frozen alive in the North Atlantic, his serum keeping him in suspended animation.

  Bucky's fate was stranger. Soviet General Vasily Karpov and the crew of a Russian patrol submarine found him. He had no enhanced abilities like those of Captain America, yet he was alive, partly preserved by the freezing water. The Soviets revived him. He had lost his left arm and suffered brain damage and amnesia. Karpov saw that Bucky still kept his combat skills and instincts, and sent him to a secret Soviet agency called Department X.

  Department X scientists fitted him with a bionic arm to replace the one he lost. After hypnotic training, he became a secret assassin known as the Winter Soldier. Between missions, he was kept in suspended animation for months and sometimes years at a time. Each time technology improved, his arm was upgraded. Later he passed into the care of Karpov's protégé, a Russian general named Aleksander Lukin. Because of his repeated stretches in cryogenic stasis, he had aged little more than ten years since 1945.

  Lukin eventually sent him to kill the Red Skull and Jack Monroe. The Skull survived by placing his mind inside a damaged Cosmic Cube, a reality-altering device. On Lukin's orders, the Winter Soldier then launched a terrorist attack on Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It killed hundreds and recharged the Cube. Hundreds died in that attack, and nobody yet knew the killer's name.

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• 5. Why He Stayed Dead

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  By 2006, the saying about Bucky, Jason Todd and Uncle Ben had stopped being true. All three characters had been brought back to life in their own universes. Uncle Ben's return was undone in the same story arc that revived him.

  For most of the decades between, Bucky's death did quiet work inside Marvel's stories. It explained why the Marvel Universe has almost no young sidekicks. No responsible hero wants to put a minor in the same danger.

  Stan Lee disliked the device on its own terms. In the 1970s he said that "one of my many pet peeves has always been the young teenage sidekick of the average superhero." Writers Roger Stern and John Byrne also considered bringing Bucky back, then decided against it.

  Bucky's own co-creator felt differently. In 1990, someone asked Jack Kirby whether he had ever heard talk of resurrecting Bucky. Kirby answered: "Speaking completely for myself, I wouldn't mind bringing Bucky in; he represents teenagers, and there are always teenagers; he's a universal character."

  In 2005, series writer Ed Brubaker finally brought Bucky back in the story arc "The Winter Soldier." He also rewrote the past. Bucky's official role as a sidekick, Brubaker revealed, had been a cover. Barnes had been a 16-year-old operative trained for work that regular soldiers and the twenty-something Captain America would not do, including covert assassinations. That detail made his death far harder to read as a sidekick tragedy and set the tone for what followed.

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• 6. Redemption

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  Sharon Carter, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and former lover of Steve Rogers, was the first to tell Captain America that the Winter Soldier looked like Bucky Barnes. Ed Brubaker and artist Steve Epting created the Winter Soldier for this story, and they used Sharon to start the chase. S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury confirmed the assassin existed, and Steve soon saw evidence that the man was truly Bucky, alive but brainwashed.

  After fighting him, Captain America used the Cosmic Cube to restore his memories. Brubaker later clarified how that worked. Captain America did not "will" Bucky's memories and personality into the assassin. He only used the Cube so the Winter Soldier could remember who he truly was. That closed any loophole that a later writer could use to claim the assassin was someone else who only believed himself to be Bucky.

  Barnes was overwhelmed with guilt over what he had done as an assassin. He crushed the Cosmic Cube and escaped.

  Soon afterward, he helped Captain America fight off a terrorist attack in London. Then he approached Nick Fury and asked for work and new equipment. He was now a dark hero searching for a way to atone.

  He arrived just as the Superhuman Registration Act threatened to force every superhero to register with the government or face prison without trial. That split the hero community into a Civil War. Steve Rogers defended unregistered heroes against Tony Stark and those who believed in enforcing the law. Rogers eventually surrendered, in exchange for amnesty for heroes who had opposed registration and now agreed to comply.

  The Winter Soldier helped Fury plan Rogers's escape. Before they could act, a hypnotized Sharon Carter seemingly assassinated Rogers. That left the shield with no owner, and Tony Stark was already preparing to name a replacement.

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• 7. Shield and Strength

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  Barnes's first move after Rogers's apparent death was to steal Captain America's shield so that nobody could pass it on. The Red Skull then had Doctor Faustus try to brainwash him. That attempt failed, and Barnes escaped, only to be captured by S.H.I.E.L.D., which Tony Stark now led.

  Stark told Barnes that Rogers had left a letter asking Stark to watch over him and to keep the Captain America legacy alive. Stark suggested that Barnes take the title. Barnes agreed on conditions. He wanted complete autonomy, freedom from the Registration Act, and S.H.I.E.L.D. telepaths to search his mind for any leftover Department X commands.

  His new costume was laced with adamantium. Because he had never received the super-soldier serum or Erskine's "vita-rays," he carried a pistol and a combat knife along with the shield.

  A time travel incident then carried the sixteen-year-old Bucky and the Invaders from 1941 to the present. There the teenager met his older self. Without revealing who he was, the older Barnes urged the boy not to disarm the bomb on the experimental plane in 1945. The teenager ignored the advice, letting his life unfold as it should rather than risk unforeseen damage.

  In the 2009 storyline "Captain America: Reborn," Barnes learned Rogers was not dead but trapped in a fixed position of time and space. The Red Skull possessed Rogers and attacked Barnes before being defeated. For a time Rogers and Barnes both operated as Captain America. After the Siege of Asgard, Rogers returned the shield to Barnes and retired his uniform, choosing to act as a maskless hero.

  When Barnes's identity became public, he was tried for crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier. An American court found him not guilty. Russian officials then took him away, accusing him of crimes against the state and of killing two civilians. Sharon Carter and Black Widow found that the victims were connected to the Red Room, the covert program that created the Black Widow operatives. Barnes escaped and returned to the United States, but he feared he was too tainted to remain Captain America.

  In the 2011 Fear Itself storyline, he took up the identity again and was apparently killed in battle with Sin, who was temporarily empowered by Asgardian forces as Skadi. The Infinity Formula revived him and raised his vitality, though less than the serum had raised Rogers's. With the world believing the new Captain America dead, he returned to covert work for S.H.I.E.L.D. and the U.S. military as the Winter Soldier. Only Rogers, Nick Fury, and Black Widow knew. The series that followed lasted 19 issues, with Brubaker writing the first 14 and Jason Latour the last arc.

  Later storylines kept testing him. In Avengers: Standoff!, a girl named Kobik, empowered as a living Cosmic Cube, apparently restored Steve Rogers in the town of Pleasant Hill. Bucky did not realize this Rogers was an alternate counterpart who had been loyal to Hydra since World War II. During Secret Empire, Helmut Zemo used Kobik to send Bucky back to World War II to kill him. Bucky returned to the present and defeated Captain America, restoring his original self. Afterward, after contact with a shadowy group called the Outer Circle, he became the new Revolution and brought the organization down from within.

  His abilities reflect all those years. He is a master of hand-to-hand combat and martial arts, skilled with firearms and grenades, and he sometimes used throwing knives. He speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Latin, and Japanese, and he can understand French. His cybernetic left arm has superhuman strength and fast reactions. It works even when detached and can discharge an EMP that shuts down electronics. The Infinity Formula leaves him stronger and faster than a normal man his size, but none of his traits are superhuman, and he is not on the level of a super-soldier.

  As Captain America, he carries the original indestructible vibranium-steel alloy shield and wears a shock-absorbing Kevlar and Nomex costume. Alex Ross designed it with input from Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, and Tom Brevoort. Ross kept the winged helmet and the "A" emblem, then worked the shape of the original triangular shield into the breastplate. He replaced chain mail with chrome armor worn over a plain black outfit.

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• 8. Acclaim and Screens

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  In 2011, IGN ranked Bucky Barnes 53rd in its list of the top 100 comic book heroes. A year later, it placed him 8th among its top 50 Avengers. IGN called him one of the most iconic superhero sidekicks of the Golden Age and said he had become one of the central players in the Marvel Universe.

  George Marston of Newsarama went further. He asked how a character could go from a hackneyed relic of a bygone age to one of the most popular in modern comics, and he credited Bucky's unlikely return from death. In 2022, Newsarama ranked Bucky 3rd in its list of the best superhero sidekicks of all time. In 2020, Comic Book Resources placed him 4th among every version of Captain America and 6th among the best Marvel anti-heroes.

  Outside the main comics, alternate versions have turned him into very different people. In the Ultimate Marvel universe, he is a press photographer married to Gail Richards. In the Ultimate Universe imprint, he leads the Red Skull Gang, a neo-Nazi group he joined undercover at Nick Fury's insistence. In House of M, a government agent sent to kill Magneto, he is killed instead.

  On television, Carl Banas voiced him in the "Captain America" segment of The Marvel Super Heroes. In The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Captain America unknowingly uses the Cosmic Cube to revive him, and Hydra captures him. Video games have used him extensively as the Winter Soldier. Crispin Freeman voiced him as a mini-boss in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. He appears in Marvel Snap and Marvel Rivals, and in Marvel's Avengers a version of him is held in a space station for experimentation.

  Sebastian Stan plays him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as part of a nine-picture deal with Marvel Studios. The role began with Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011 and continued with The Winter Soldier in 2014 and Ant-Man in 2015. He then appeared in Civil War in 2016, Black Panther in 2018, Infinity War in 2018, and Endgame in 2019. The miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier followed in 2021. Stan also voices alternate versions in the animated series What If...? Brave New World and Thunderbolts* both arrived in 2025, and a further film, Avengers: Doomsday, is announced for 2026.

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