In Left Unresolved, I spotlight storylines that have been, well, left unresolved.

Today, based on a suggestion from reader Fernando S., we look to see if there are perhaps two copies of Captain America's shield lying around the Marvel Universe now!

NOTE: This article includes spoilers for some fairly recent issues of Captain America! Be forewarned!

It all started pretty recently with Captain America #697, by Mark Waid, Chris Samnee and Matthew Wilson. In that issue, Captain America faces off against Kraven the Hunter, but at the end of the issue, he is shockingly once again frozen!!

The next issue, he awakens in the future....

As it turns out, right after Captain America was frozen and captured by Hydra at the end of #697, they launched a weapon that caused the terrible nuclear fallout that led to the situation of the world in the future. So in the future, Captain America helped fight his way to the freedom of the country. This arc had a bunch of cool future scenarios (this really was an area where Waid and Samnee got to do their own version of the Atomic Knights and/or Kirby's Kamandi. Very cool stuff). Eventually, Cap has to essentially become the KING of this new world in order to save it all. That's not what he would have liked to do, but hey, it's what he had to do.

Anyhow, eventually, they came up with an idea - to send Captain America back in time so that he could prevent the initial launch of the weapon that caused the problem in the first place!

So Cap goes back in time at the end of the story in Captain America #700, but as it turns out, time travel is not something exact, so while they meant for Cap to have a week or so before the missile launched, he instead only has ten minutes. He arrives just as his other self is being frozen by the ice.

The other Cap then beats his way to the launch of the missile and then essentially sacrifices himself so that it does not launch in the first place. Really great scene here by Samnee and Wilson...

Clever, right? The destruction of future Cap stops the missile but it also leads to Cap being thawed out right away, so Captain America dies, but is then just taken over by his own previous self. All nice and neat and good like that.

Except, of course, what about the shield from the time-traveling Cap? It seems extremely hard to believe that the indestructible shield of Captain America just blew up in that explosion, no? So then that means there are two versions of Cap's shield out there, right?

Now, odds are that this will be like the story I did about the two Wolverines following Age of Ultron or the two She-Hulks following Heroes Return, in that this won't ever be explained, but since this JUST happened, there is still time for this to actually be addressed in the comics, so I'll leave it as a "Left Unresolved" for now.

Thanks to Fernando for the suggestion!

If anyone else has a suggestion for a future edition of Left Unresolved, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!