Ultimate Captain America

I agree with this. [Link] I've never really liked Ultimate Cap very much either. He does have his moments, but still, not a very nice guy.

I had an epiphany today as to why Ultimate Captain America does nothing for me, even though the 616 one is one of my favorite Marvel characters.

Ultimate Captain America's a hardened soldier and something of an ass and it seems to make sense with his back story, so I'm not really complaining about that.

But I think he really has lost something that 616 Cap's always had. Because at heart, 616's Captain America is, I think, still a dreamy artist in the body of a greek god.

Essentially, he should be a lot more Kyle Rayner than Hal Jordan.

Okay, admittedly, he's much MUCH smarter than Kyle and much less flighty, and certainly seems to have more of an attention span. But something of that dreamy idealism's still there. Even years at war shouldn't have gotten rid of it completely.

In the comments there:

The thing is, when Millar created the Ultimates, what he basically did was took each 616 character, identified one trait that they possessed (or were thought to possess), and then made that essentially the sum of their Ultimate caricature. So:

Iron Man = Drunk
Giant-Man = Wifebeater (which is a particularly grotesque distortion of the 616 Pym)

Cap, however, isn't anything like the 616 version, so much as he's an agglomeration of all the parodies and cliches based on the character by people who've never actually read any of his comics: he's a jingoistic thug. Ultimate Cap is really Ultimate USAgent, the character Gruenwald created in the 80s as a parody of Reagan/Rambo-era action heroes.

Yes! I can enjoy watching USAgent (Guy Gardener is one of my favorite characters!), but he's not Cap.