I just thought that would be a really cool way to actually reemphasize who this guy is and why he's this hero and why he's Captain America. Instead of just retelling his origin and retelling key moments of his life, we see him being forced to have to live through them again and decide whether to change things. The idea was it would give me a way to explore Steve's life from a different perspective.

I knew when Sharon broke the machine in issue #42 that Steve had come unstuck in time, because they were bringing him there. Even before I knew Hitch was going to draw it, I knew that when we got around to telling this story that a lot of it would need to focus on Steve too – like a third or half the series would need to be about Steve. Especially when I found out we were going to do it as a separate miniseries/event and that Hitch was going to draw it. IGN Comics: Did that just seem like a natural source of inspiration when you were figuring out how to bring him back? Brubaker: Yeah. He's a World War II soldier who has come unstuck in time. IGN Comics: The hook of Reborn obviously owes a lot to Slaughterhouse Five, and you even reference Vonnegut's famous line directly in the first issue when you say 'Steve Rogers has come unstuck in time.' Brubaker: I even used, ' Listen – Steve Rogers has come unstuck in time.' I thought I couldn't possibly be more obvious about this being a Slaughterhouse Five riff. It just kept growing and growing in the telling, but the basic mechanics of how Steve was shot and how he'd come back was stuff I figured out three years ago or so. So I went a year without anyone called Captain America in the book. That gives you a lot of stories to tell, surprisingly.

I realized there was a lot of territory there to cover in a book called Captain America where nobody was named Captain America. Then that story kept growing as it was being told, and Marvel, my editors and Dan Buckley all told me to take my time and tell the story as I wanted to tell it. What ended up happening in Cap #42 was going to take place around issue #30 or #31. Originally Cap was only going to be dead for six months. IGN Comics: When and how did the specifics of the story and Steve's return start to take shape in your mind? Brubaker: Most of it I knew around the time of writing issue #25. IGN Comics: You've mentioned that you've been building towards the return of Steve Rogers for a quite some time now - Ed Brubaker: Since issue #25.

Captain America by Ed Brubaker