In 1995, a year after the issues collected in Captain America Epic Collection: Twilight’s Last Gleaming were released, writer Mark Gruenwald passed away after suffering a heart attack at the young age of 43.
He had been working for Marvel since 1978, when he was hired based on the encyclopedic work he had been producing for his own fanzine, Omniverse, in which he posited the then-radical idea that all fictional realities existed alongside one another. It was this encyclopedic knowledge of continuity that made him an ideal fit for an editor position at Marvel. He eventually spun that knowledge into The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
By the end of his run on Captain America, he had been writing the character for a decade; he wrote 106 issues of the book, dragging the character through times thick and thin and instilling in him a sense of tolerance and civic duty. His was a Cap who quit the role in protest of political mishandling, whose book introduced mainstream comics’ first openly gay character. Always a paragon, it’s still hard to imagine the version of Cap we have today—let alone the Cap we saw in the MCU—without the massive work put into the character by Gruenwald.
With then-struggling profits and ever-shrinking presence in Marvel’s most popular books, however, Captain America was not a major Marvel product in the mid-to-late 90s, and though the character had a major resurgence just after crossing over into the new millennium, it was the work of Mark Gruenwald that dragged the character through that rough decade.
It’s a bit rough, then, reading Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and not just because the book features Gruenwald’s final word on the character—and, with it, some of his final words in the Marvel Universe.
It’s rough because Twilight’s Last Gleaming isn’t particularly good.
Gruenwald, ever the study of style and trends, saw the direction comics were heading. The mid-’90s was a post-Image world, a time of gimmicks and merchandising. It was the time of Force Works and Carnage. It was the age of Adam X, the X-Treme, and Gruenwald must have felt compelled to respond to that aesthetic; this volume introduces both Free Spirit and Jack Flag, characters less inspired to their red, white, and blue costuming by Cap’s civic pride and rebellious patriotism than by trendy happenstance.
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Late artist Dave Hoover also leans the book into the dated aesthetics of the ’90s, his characters stretched taffy-thin and leggy while also being made heavy by the endless cross-hatching that was popular at the time. It’s a book that looks like the ’90s, even though Hoover never devolves to the woeful lows found elsewhere in comics; Captain America is as restrained as the aesthetic might be expressed.
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Twilight’s Last Gleaming isn’t a book that adheres to Gruenwald’s legacy on the character, jettisoning long-developed characters and leaving behind unresolved plotlines to clear the way for the next creative team, Mark Waid and Ron Garney.
Distressingly, the book centers around Cap’s physical deterioration after ignoring a doctor’s warning that physical exertion might kill him – the super soldier serum is breaking down. Like Gruenwald would himself, Cap himself suffers cardiac arrest. It’s a harsh conclusion to one of the great runs on Captain America and a sorry representation of one of the great architects (and academics) in comics history.
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