So, I walk into Midtown’s Times Square store and it’s full of people, which isn’t unusual for a Wednesday morning, even one where it’s a bitingly cold 7 degrees outside. But today there seems to be a bit of an added bustle — it seems everybody’s abuzz about Captain America being assassinated. Which many of them found out reading the Daily News during their morning commute, or Yahoo’s front page browsing the net at work. So, while Marvel managed to keep Cap’s fate off the internet radar (or at least limit it to speculation), their hype machine was clearly running smoothly. My boss (as mentioned in my sidebar, I’m Midtown’s webmaster) informs me that FOX News and Spike TV have already been in-store to cover the Event. And Reuters, ABC and who knows who else will be by to do the same before the day is out.

As I’m writing this there’s a line going up and down the length of the store, taking up two of the three aisles, a sight which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen at Midtown since I started working here (so I try to capture it with my phone’s crappy camera). Noting the crowd, one frazzled staffer says to me “Happy Captain America Day”. I just wondered, ‘Will Cap even stay dead long enough for an anniversary of this?’

I’d probably be completely unmoved by all this, except for one thing — the story itself is a good one. Brubaker’s been planting the seeds and leading up to this for a while now, so you really can’t help but feel for the principal characters if you’ve been reading the book all along. (And if you haven’t been reading it, you missed out on some good stuff — if only we could’ve said the same for Civil War. The way Cap went out in CW, this is almost a mercy killing…)