Evans talks 'Cap', explains post on bomber cover

SAN DIEGO (AP) Chris Evans doesn't post on Twitter often, but when the actor saw the recent Rolling Stone cover featuring Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he sent out a short missive: "Bad move Rolling Stone."

Evans appeared Saturday at Comic-Con to promote his new film "Captain America: The Winter Soldier." Asked about the tweet, he said he felt the magazine intentionally glamorized Tsarnaev. The 19-year-old is accused of setting off two bombs with his brother during the marathon in April. Three people died and more than 250 were injured in the attack.

"I just felt on that Rolling Stone cover he looked like Jim Morrison," Evans said. "He looked like a rock star. It glorified him.

"If you want to do a story, if you want to examine how a young kid can be turned, and if you want to examine innocence lost and all those things, it's fine. The problem is putting him on the cover in that picture in that light, it glorified him. There's no two ways about it. He looked great."

Rolling Stone should have used a different picture, Evans said. "Show his mug shot, show something else that kind of doesn't make it look so fantastic to do such a horrible thing."

Interestingly, the issues Rolling Stone raised about Tsarnaev's complicated background are similar to the issues Captain America deals with in the sequel.

The "Captain America" comic book character was created in 1941 during the run-up to the United States' involvement in World War II. It was a tale of Steve Rogers, a gangly Army reject who participates in the government's secret soldier program and transforms into the patriotic warrior.

The world he lived in was much simpler. Determining good and evil was an easy matter. In the first film about the Marvel character, 2011's "Captain America: The First Avenger," Cap awakes after being frozen in Arctic ice for 70 years. The world he finds is very different than the one he left.

The sequel, due out next April, presents the red, white and blue hero with far more challenges to navigate.

"Now that he has the tools to fight the good fight, whose side is he fighting for?" Evans asked. "I think in the '40s it was a lot easier to say, 'We know Nazis are bad.' I think it's a bit harder to know who's right and who's wrong today. I think that conflict that Steve's going through in the movie couldn't be more updated and more modern. What's right? Where's the line? Where do you draw it? It's so tricky, I wish I could tell you more."

Samuel L. Jackson says his character, SHIELD director Nick Fury, tries to help Cap come to grips with the 21st century as they work to unravel the mystery around The Winter Soldier. In the comic, the character is Cap's former sidekick who becomes a sleeper agent for the enemy. In the past, how the hero dealt with an enemy would be cut and dried, but not today.

"Now he's got to understand that the enemy's not black and white anymore," Jackson said. "It's not that guy over there and us over here. It's kind of gray. Some of those guys that were enemies before are now our allies in a kind of way. So you've got to wrap your head around that."

Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios and the film's producer, says fans looking for clues to the new "The Avengers" sequel should not miss the "Captain America" sequel.

The film, "much more than 'Iron Man 3' or 'Thor: The Dark World', is connected and the linchpin between 'Avengers' 1 and 'Avengers' 2," he said. "The events of 'Avengers' play directly into the events of 'Winter Soldier,' primarily in the fact that Cap is now in the modern day working with SHIELD, working with Nick Fury, working with Black Widow in a very good way. And the events of that movie will have a direct repercussion on the events of 'Avengers' 2."

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Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott