The tenth issue of Captain America: Sam Wilson ties directly into Civil War II as Captain America and the World’s Mightiest Heroes say goodbye to an old friend and national hero.

When Steve Rogers battled the Iron Nail, the super-soldier serum that gave him his iconic powers was neutralized, causing his body to age and wither to its natural state. No longer fit and able, he handed over the shield to` The Falcon, his long-time partner Sam Wilson, to serve as Captain America. Sam and his team – Misty Knight, a private detective with a bionic arm to rival Bucky’s, Dennis Dunphy, a former pro-wrestler with super strength and Joaquin Torres, Marvel’s brand-new Falcon – have already faced their fair share of challenges, not least due to a lack of public acceptance and support for this new, partisan, African-American Captain America, despite Steve Rogers’ direct endorsement. With Marvel’s new Civil War event already underway, Sam must juggle this backlash with the problems of the people he’s promised to protect and the divisive and dangerous issues facing his superhero family.

Nick Spencer pairs with a variety of artists including Daniel Acuña, Paul Renaud and, this month, Angel Unzueta, for a sensitive and strong-willed take on the new Sentinel of Liberty.

Previously, in ‘Captain America: Sam Wilson’…

Sam became Cap before the Secret Wars incident leading to a reboot of every Marvel title, but his actual solo title Captain America: Sam Wilson was one of the first stories of the All New All Different regime to go into publication, with the first issue dropping in October 2015 after the unveiling of various titles last July. Issues #1 – #6 follows Sam as a Captain America not universally accepted by the public, as he publicly and officially takes (very left-leaning) stances on a number of political and social issues people felt he didn’t have the right to take. He’s persona non grata at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ too, due to helping The Whisperer, a hacker who leaked government intel, escape custody. No longer an employee of S.H.I.E.L.D., Sam offers himself up directly to the American people as a free agent, setting up a hotline for citizens to report cases they want Captain America’s help with.

When a call about a missing teenager in Arizona leads Sam to investigate some attacks on border-crossing migrants by racist hate group Sons of the Serpent (no, really, their leader references Trump’s “mighty wall”) he discovers that the Sons are being used as a front by the supervillain Serpent Society for kidnapping – delivering healthy undocumented men to be used in illegal human-animal hybrid genetic experiments. When they bust the lab, Sam gets himself a Falcon sidekick of his very own: Joaquin Torres, the missing teen he was asked to find, who, due to Dr Malus’s experimentation, is now a human-falcon hybrid with real wings. Oh yeah, and Malus also made Sam into a werewolf. Temporarily. Throwback!

Captain America: Sam Wilson #7 and #8 were direct tie-ins with the Avengers: Standoff miniseries, also penned by Spencer as a continuous five-issue arc. As we recapped, Sam reunited with both Steve and Bucky in Pleasant Hill. The former and presents Caps worked together to bring an end to Maria Hill’s supervillain prison, which used the sentient cosmic cube child called Kobik to perform bizarre brainwashing-in-the-name-of-justice.

Issue #7 was the 75th anniversary celebration for Captain America in general, and featured a great cover that replicated the original Captain America #1 from 1941. In the anniversary issue, Steve is restored to his prime by Kobik and is able to once again take up the mantle of Captain America. By the end of Standoff, Steve and Sam make an agreement to keep serving as Cap, because two Caps are better than one, right? Well, not if one of them’s Hydra.

However, there was no hint of that dark twist yet in Captain America: Sam Wilson #9, which served as an epilogue for Avengers: Standoff and featured Sam and his team attending the ceremony celebrating Steve’s re-induction as Captain America. Seeing Steve back in action causes public opinion of Sam to sink even lower, but behind the scenes Steve and Sam are a united front, working together to plan a secret tribunal for Maria Hill’s crimes.

At the ceremony, Sam saves Steve from an assassin in front of the crowds, and Steve publicly reiterates their partnership, but the assassin was a Pleasant Hill inmate, a minor criminal who swore to go straight but got frustrated waiting for justice to be served to S.H.I.E.L.D. and Maria Hill for their violation of human rights — keeping her trial a secret, for safety concerns — like other villains going after Kobik — means that from the outside, it looks like she’s getting off scot free.

In other news, the final page reveal shows us that Americops — big metal-masked humanoid law enforcers, spreading fear in local neighborhoods — are apparently now a thing.

Since the release of CapSam #9, the Avengers at large have landed some bigger fish to fry. Both Sam and Steve take part in the battle that ends up being the catalyst for Civil War II, and are present at the first confrontation between the Avengers and the Inhumans about Ulysses. At this point in that story, Sam seems to be backing Carol — at least in their initial attempts to stop Tony when he kidnaps and tortures Ulysses – but he’s meant to end up on Team Iron Man at some point. However, today is not the day that we discover how that happens. Captain America: Sam Wilson #10 is a Civil War II tie-in, but it’s here that Marvel has chosen honored their latest fallen hero.

I knew how important this was going to be.

Before we get to that, though: Sam catches us up on how things have been going for him — for one, #givebacktheshield is still trending. He’s still not accepted as Captain America. Despite Steve telling the world that he welcomes Sam in sharing the role, the masses claim to not care about Steve’s personal opinion, despite holding him in high esteem as a worthy Cap. We also immediately learn that the Americops are a private policing initiative, put in place by by Keane Industries and supported by Texas senator Tom Herald, who plans to push a bill forcing federal law enforcement to share resources with Keane’s Americops.

Of course, the results this faceless army has reaped so far are pretty much what you’d expect. Deployment in low-income, high-crime minority neighborhoods. Profiling. Harassment. Excessive force. Denials of this from the higher ranks. Waves of marginalized, angry people getting ready to fight back. This is a problem for future Sam to deal with. Today, he has other commitments. Dressed in a civilian suit, he arrives at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia – painstakingly recreated on the page by Unzueta – and makes his way to a chamber where a handful of Marvel’s most prominent black superheroes await him. Besides Misty, the group includes Luke Cage, T’Challa, Nick Fury, Spectrum, Doctor Voodoo and Storm, who makes apologies for the absent Blade.

They welcome one another and begin to recount the events leading to Rhodey’s death – T’Challa and Spectrum were both present on the mission – which leads to bickering about the issue of Carol and her plan for Ulysses, but Sam pulls themselves up short, deeming this an inappropriate moment. He also says they need to figure out who should speak, at the memorial, and the rest of them look at him in amazement — they’d all automatically assumed that he would, being Captain America and all.

Sam and Misty take some time to themselves for Sam to express his doubts and insecurities about performing such a task — that he didn’t even know Rhodes that well. We learn that this gathering of black heroes is due to a plan of Luke Cage’s that they all committed to (“If one of us dies, the rest of us show up together, for the community”) and he’d prefer Luke give the speech, if not someone closer to Rhodey, like Tony or Carol. He really doesn’t understand why it should be him. Misty gently reads him the riot act at this point, about what he symbolizes, and encourages him to change into the red, white and blue, and put himself out there as a source of hope. He delivers a eulogy which recounts Rhodey’s time as Iron Man, and what it means for a black man to take up the armor of a founding Avenger.

At the funeral, Tony isn’t even present — they’ll likely deal with his grief in his own book, because having him present here would have eclipsed the emotions of everyone else in the room. Marvel chose to feature the funeral of James Rhodes in his hometown, in a black church, and to focus on the grief of the black community and what he would have meant to them as a symbol, as a hero. Sam himself is also finally forced to reflect on what it means for him to be Captain America and be black — a fact that his right-wing detractors have been pussy-footing around for the last ten issues. As Misty reminds him, even his supporters try to act like it’s not a big deal, that it’s beyond being controversial, but the fact is, it isn’t. And today is a day that there’s no getting around that. Sam is a black man, and he’s Captain America. Another black hero is dead. He has a duty.

In this issue, no white characters speak in real time — just in some news reports and television footage at the beginning. Every black character featured is named, their powers identified, and they are given an opinion or an emotion to share. This should not be rocket science, or something worth lauding or highlighting. But with the current ratio of white to non-white representation in not just Marvel, not just comics, but all of entertainment – not to mention the ratio of white to non-white deaths — it’s certainly worth commenting on. I’m not black. The writer of this book, Nick Spencer, is not black. But from my limited perspective, I feel like Marvel has done the right thing by James Rhodes in focusing on what his loss means to this community, rather than to a rich white man. Captain America: Sam Wilson was the perfect venue to showcase this.

Writer Nick Spencer is currently in the line of fire for his work on Captain America: Steve Rogers — yes, he’s handling both Caps concurrently — due to the reveal last month in that book’s first issue that Steve was actually a secret Hydra agent. But however abhorrent that concept might be — a concept that’s been elaborated upon today, in issue #2 – Spencer is a writer that I trust, and this issue is a good example of why. Not only is this issue incredibly empathetic, sensitive towards the needs of a minority group in the wake of the death of one of their own, Captain America: Sam Wilson is a deeply partisan text – Sam isn’t the only one who’s been criticized for standing up for the issues he believes in. Because art imitates life, CapSam #1 was slammed by Fox & Friends (of course) for being too political, and too critical of conservatives. It’d be funny, if their obliviousness wasn’t so terrifying.

Spencer’s writing is certainly scathing of the far right, from mocking one liners placed in a bad guy’s mouth (“You know how you make me press a one for English at the beginning of every call to my satellite provider? That is something I cannot abide!” a Son of the Serpent cries in issue #1) to the slightly more true-to-life insanity of right-wing pundits (“It’s time we took a stand against the political correctness that now permeates the Avengers.”) Even more sinister, present in Standoff and CapSteve, is the budding threat of the Red Skull, quietly indoctrinating white supremacists in order to build himself an army of believers.

Spencer’s Marvel world reflects the present one — a breeding ground for hatred, a powder keg waiting for a spark. It’s clearly something he himself is horrified by, and he’s willing to politicize the patriotic Captain America more than ever before in order to say so. I’m pretty sure Nick Spencer is fighting for the same things I’m fighting for, Hydra Steve or no.

What comes next? As I mentioned, Sam’s meant to end up on Tony’s team in the Civil War II showdown, and Captain America: Sam Wilson #11 may be where that falls into place. Marvel’s synopsis simply reads: “CIVIL WAR II TIE-IN! With the battle lines forming, Sam must choose a side.”

Captain America: Sam Wilson #11 will be released on Wednesday, July 6.