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 The press tour for Marvel Studios' Captain America: Brave New World is underway, and in one day the film's star Anthony Mackie hit all the big stops in NYC: Good Morning America, Live with Kelly & Mark, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and... a comic book store?!

Face it, true believers - a comic book actor isn't only talking about comics, but he and Marvel Studios made a visit to the Times Square location of Midtown Comics a key part of its press tour this month. While there, the actor talked about being a customer of Midtown before he was famous, and also talked briefly about the fact people don't read comics as much as they used to.

But they should.

In early 2024, Marvel Comics' president/publisher Dan Buckley said that the comics and movies divisions are working "much more closely," with a goal to "drum up excitement for comics relating to major studio events" - and specifically to comic book stores.

"It is a priority for Marvel Comics to leverage the power of Marvel Studios to generate awareness, trial, and traffic, with the intent to convert those MCU fans into customers for you," Buckley says, referring to comic store retailers.

With Captain America: Brave New World coming soon (or here now, depending on when you're reading this), Popverse has accumulated a list of the top comics to read before and after the fourth Cap film. Some are the inspiration for the movie, while others are coming about because of the movie... and some are just ones Anthony Mackie is a big fan of.

Captain America: Secret Empire, and fighting a US President in the White House

Marvel Studios' assigned Captain America: Brave New World producer Nate Moore points specifically to the Marvel Comics storyline 'Secret Empire' as inspiration - but not the one people remember from the derided 2017 comics event of the same name. Instead, he's referring to a 1974 storyline in the main Captain America series.

"It's the notion of a guy who believes an ideal, realizing that ideal is not always held up to the same standards by other people, and feeling really betrayed by where the American government had gone," Nate Moore told Entertainment Weekly. 

Moore backs away from saying the movie is adapting the 1974 'Secret Empire' arc, but points to the idea of Captain America being cast as unpatriotic for disagreeing with a sitting US President.

"The Red Hulk is the cherry on the sundae because then you get to have a physical manifestation of that," Moore adds.

The original 'Secret Empire' arc was written by Steve Englehart and Mike Friedrich then drawn by Sal Buscema. The story, an admitted allegory to the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal which happened just two years prior, begins when Captain America is targeted by what would now be known as a SuperPAC attempting to discredit him and cast him as a menace to society, and a lawbreaker. Over the course of the storyline, he learns that it is instigated by the sitting US President as an operative of a Hydra offshoot organization known as the Secret Empire. The arc culminates with a fight inside the White House's Oval Office, with the never-named US President ultimately killing himself to avoid prosecution after Cap exposes him.

"I was writing a man who believed in America's highest ideals at a time when America's President was a crook," Englehart is quoted as saying in 2011's Mad as Hell by Dominic Sandbrook. "I could not ignore that."

Buy Now on Amazon: Captain America: Secret Empire

An all-new Captain America: Sam Wilson comic

While this comic is less an inspiration for Captain America: Brave New World than inspired by the comic-turned-movie-turned-comic, the five-issue Sam Wilson, Captain America series has Sam-as-Cap, has your Red Hulk, has your Falcon, has your Isaiah Bradley just like the MCU movie - it also adds in puzzle pieces not in the movie (or at least, not that we know of) such as Bradley's son Josiah X, Bradley's grandson Patriot, Misty Knight, War Machine, Storm, Steve Rogers, and more.

Buy now on Amazon: Sam Wilson, Captain America

Anthony Mackie loves this Captain America kids' book

Marvel has done kids' books before, but the recent A Hero Looks Like You picture book really steps it up. In it, a young boy named DJ has the opportunity (and challenge) to help Sam Wilson's Captain America and learn some valuable lessons.

Mackie was seen this past weekend clutching this book while visiting the Times Square location of Midtown Comics, so I take that as an endorsement.

Buy now on Amazon: A Hero Looks Like You

Who is the Red Hulk?

No, you're not mistaken: Thunderbolt Ross as a Hulk is jarring, and wasn't the original plan, or any plan for the first 46 years the character was around. But when the new chapter in the character's life came about, it was thrilling for fans in a rare way that people loved it and people hated it, with not much in between. Since then it's become an inexorable part of the character as he kills off over a half-dozen Marvel heroes (they, um, returned), was retconned to be a part of the Super Soldier program that Cap and Wolverine both have ties to, and even joining both the Thunderbolts and Avengers at various points in his life.

If all that seems a bit much to take in, Marvel thinks so too so created an 'epic collection' of these stories called Hulk: Who is the Red Hulk?.

Buy now on Amazon: Hulk: Who is the Red Hulk?

Hulk punching Captain America's shield in Captain America #230

You can't deny that Ron Wilson and Bob Layton's cover to Captain America #230 was the inspiration behind this Captain America: Brave New World poster. And while the inspiration is only skin-deep (or is it cover-deep?), this crossover between the Captain America and Incredible Hulk books does hit on the same classic formula of two heroes meeting, fighting, then realizing their mistakes and fighting a shared villain - which may be what Marvel Studios has planned for Brave New World.

Buy now on Amazon: Captain America #230

An all-new Red Hulk series, skipping Cap to fight Doctor Doom ahead of Robert Downey Jr.'s return

As the Red Hulk makes his MCU debut in Captain America: Brave New World, Marvel Comics wants to make sure it has options for people who suddenly find themselves fans of Harrison Ford's hulking brute in a new Red Hulk limited series. While Marvel Comics isn't able to bend its storyline to make the Red Hulk a President (...yet?), this series casts Red Hulk as the same military-genius-with-a-rage-issue and at the same time a straight-up hero incarcerated by Marvel Comics' newly-entrenched world leader, Doctor Doom.

Buy now on Amazon: Red Hulk

The rise of Sam Wilson as Captain America

After decades as the sometimes-sidekick of Captain America, the Falcon stepped into his own in 2014 after his friend's retirement. In this storyline collected as Captain America: The Saga of Sam Wilson by Rick Remender, Stuart Immonen, and others, Sam Wilson has to deal with racism (thanks to fake memories of him being a pimp from Red Skull), fighting not only his MCU foes the Serpent Society but the other snake-based supervillain team Sons of the Serpent as well, and even finding a variant of a color-themed Marvel character: no, not the Red Hulk, but the Green Skull.

Buy now on Amazon: Captain America: The Saga of Sam Wilson

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Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• The MCU needs Anya Taylor-Joy's Magik in it (and not just for the X-Men connection)
• How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga
• If Marvel is going to bring Loki back for Secret Wars, it's time to give him an upgrade
• In 2021, Sony's boss said people won't miss Spider-Man in its Spider-adjacent movie. Turns out, they do.