Part of an ongoing series revisiting graphic novels and collected editions from days gone by....

It has been more than a minute since I read a Captain America book. Feeling a need for some star-spangled superheroics, I pulled Operation: Rebirth from my shelf; the collection, printed in the mid-1990s, comes from a time when I was still reading new comics each week.

It doesn't take long to pick up the storyline, which reprints issues 445-448 of the monthly book. Captain America has been declared dead after disappearing from his deathbed, where the super-soldier formula that kept him alive and healthy for decades had been slowly poisoning his system. As one might imagine, he's not truly dead -- in fact, he's been reinvigorated. (One wonders why the Powers That Be went ahead with a touching state funeral -- with President Bill Clinton among the pallbearers, no less -- because, without a body, they had to know he'd show up again eventually.)

He wakes from his coma to see Sharon Carter -- a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and his former girlfriend, whom he believed to have died on a prior mission -- supervising his awakening. (Does he even consider that it might be a duplicate of some sort? Of course not. I mean, it is really her, but damn, Cap -- it should take more than just her pretty face to convince you! Do you even read comics?)

Cap has been brought back from the edge of death through a transfusion from the Red Skull, his World War II-era nemesis whose mind survives in a body cloned previously from -- you guessed it -- Captain America. (Apparently, the serum that was killing Cap is still percolating nicely inside the Skull.) Together, Cap, Sharon and Skull must battle a cult of Neo-Nazi extremists who hope to resurrect Adolf Hitler, whose mind has apparently been trapped inside a Cosmic Cube ever since his supposed suicide at the end of the war.

Yeah, comic-book plot lines can be like that.

And, no surprise, the plot hinges a lot on Captain America being surprised that the Red Skull has betrayed him yet again. Curse you, Red Skull!

When Cap is himself projected into the Cube to live out his destiny and kill Hitler -- thus leaving the Skull to conquer the world without interference from his former Fuhrer, who was apparently carrying a grudge against him -- it looks like the end is near ... until Cap beats the Cube's dreamscape through sheer force of will and, apparently, the guidance of a ghost Bucky (who, at this point, had not yet been resurrected for realsies in the Marvel Universe).

And it looks like Cap and Sharon aren't going to fall back in love. Darn it, back in the day, they were one of those Marvel romances readers just knew would last forever, just like Spider-Man and Mary Jane!!!

Sigh.

Written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Ron Garney, Operation: Rebirth is a solid, if fairly standard, chapter from Captain America's long series of adventures. It is a bit histrionic and convoluted, but comic-book readers are used to that sort of thing. (It is, I guess, part of the reason I stopped reading them with the same gusto of my younger days.)