#63 - Secret Empire (part 3)

OK, I’ve had a nice rest, let’s get back to it.

We open with the ‘shocking’ revelation that Steve survived his little trip in the water and is free of the Red Skull.

You remember back a couple of issues Giant Man remarked that he build a gadget that could hide into the future, then time travel into New York before the darkforce engulfed it to send a message, well that’s what he’s doing and message comes from the Captain America Sam Wilson… yeah…

Long story short, the group raided a camp of imprisoned inhumans, including Misty Knight for some reason, and found 1 fragment of the cosmic cube. They hope they can use it to bring down the dark force. Oh and the message is also received by Alpha Flight, and it moves Captain Marvel to tears. Is it too late to go back to sleep?

Sorry, speeches like this are easier on the ears than on the eyes. Sam heads off with Tony giving a really lame joke. The message inspires Captain Marvel, she wants any idea they have no matter how crazy. The Guardians of the Galaxy return, they’ve not had much success getting off-world help, but why ask for help, when you can just steal it. And they have, they’ve stolen a nullifier bomb, it’s pretty powerful, supposedly stolen from Annihilus, they’re gonna have to use the ship for delivery.

In New York, Doctor Strange claims to have a possible solution, I guess they don’t want to wait then, anyway, the librarian he spoke to several issues back gave him something, but is to gain the Sanctum Santorum should it work. He requires Cloak and Dagger to do it, leading to Iron Fist making a lame joke. Sam fights against some HYDRA jets in the air but ultimately gets shot, much to Misty’s rather confusing horror. Am I missing something?

Doctor Strange begins his spell, siphoning power from both Cloak and Dagger but it ultimately fails. The nullifier bomb is sent off but ultimately is not successful either. So 17 pages of this issue wasted on false hope. Yeah… So, real hope arrives as Quasar awakens. Quasar is someone they only introduced in the current form back in Assault on Pleasant Hill, so don’t expect anyone to be too excited.

In testing Quasar had not been able to down the shield, but after dragging the station close enough for them to be able to reach earth, she blasts the force-field and ultimately breaks through. Captain Marvel quickly goes to the co-ordinates to the Chitauri eggs on Earth. Iron Man and Hawkeye are raiding another inhuman prison as Maria Hill sneaks in, apparently having been given intel from Deadpool.

Her target is Blackout. He seems to be an odd state, kinda unaware of his own reality. I feel pleasant Hill might be involved. Captain Marvel destroys all the Chitauri eggs so now the fleets of Chitauri can come wanting vengeance rather than the eggs themselves. Maria Hill remarks how the others are gonna be heroes again, but they need her to be something else. She shoots Blackout, ending the darkforce’s grip of New York, much to everyone’s delight, particularly the Kingpin.

Sam survived the gunshot, was just stunned I think and soon the fight begins to grow with the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Ultimates, Alpha Flight, Cloak and Dagger, Dr Strange and the Defenders all joining forces, although in some panels they seem to lack faces. Unfortunately, Tony somehow got word HYDRA got the cosmic cube fragments in Wakanda and New Tian, somehow, so it’s their fragment against all the others

Namor comes to join them, revealing that whilst he did surrender his piece of the cube to HYDRA, it was part of plan devised by him and a revived with no explanation Bucky Barnes (I suppose dying and coming to life is as part of his DNA as Jean Grey) they have a plan and everyone charges into battle

Back in the dreamscape, Steve finds a woman he thinks is Sharon, but she’s gone, and he’s alone with Kobik.

Despite my jab at all the false hope going on at once, the pacing is better this issue, delivering plenty of action and a satisfying turning of the tides, but there are problems. If, anything, it’s now too fast and things could’ve happened in earlier issues. For me though, the biggest issue is just how contrived this issue is, from Quasar waking immediately after the bomb thing, to Bucky Barnes being alive again, despite being dead for most of this event. His resurrection, like Black Widow’s, was inevitable, bur even a token explanation would be nice.

Then there’s the moral factor. Spider-man does not kill Cap in the last issue, it’s portrayed as the morally correct choice. Here, Maria Hill shoots someone who’s mentally ill and Captain Marvel obliterates a Chitauri nest, whilst Maria Hill is a morally grey character, it certainly didn’t feel like they wanted us to bat an eyelid at it.

Then there’s the lame jokes, the attempts at humour are lame and don’t fit with the style this is going for. Also, the narration is obnoxious and preachy.

Kobik is sorry, she wanted to make everything better but ending up making everything worse, she gets Steve to remember before taking him to the ruins of Pleasant Hill. Meanwhile Zemo is back from being absent from several issues, and he’s brought a friend, T’Challa as a prisoner, and presumably also his fragment of the cosmic cube. Panther promises to break out of his cuffs and then break Zemo, which is not an idle threat coming from T’Challa. Zemo asks if Cap wants to get it over with but he refuses, saying they’ll want an audience.

Next up on Steve’s visit list is a designation from New Tian, Emma Frost, the Beast and one of the guys from the Hellfire club… I don’t read X-men books, alright? They were delayed because of the fighting down below, it’s suggested that Cap move his ship but he’s right where he wants to be. After a 2-page spread of the fight, we see more help. Including Spider-man (Peter Parker), Red Hulk who’s wearing glasses for some reason, Captain Britain and various others I don’t recognise.

OK, I’ve got another complaint to make, shocker I know. I direct your attention to the trade cover of this event. 

Let’s look at the choice of heroes on the cover. Front and centre is Spider-man, Peter Parker has been dealing with sh*t in his own title and hasn’t appeared in the main event until now, #9 of 10, and he’s not in the epilogue. Old Man Logan, again he doesn’t show up in the main story until this issue. Rocket Racoon, he was in #3 briefly and came back in #8, not exactly major either. Lady Thor, who without her hammer, can’t transform so she’s only briefly in this event at all.

Captain Marvel makes a bit more sense. Ms Marvel isn’t part of the Champions subplot, I know Champions main book had some tie-ins where she may have featured but I refuse to read them. Far as I remember Medusa does not have significant role in this story and neither do Storm or the Human Torch. Doctor Strange was in New York but his role until now has been minimal. And lastly we have Iron Heart, I think, could be Iron Man but it’s got the more jagged design I associate with Riri. Why are there so many irrelevant characters on this cover?

Who are the main players? Aside from Cap we see none of the HYDRA forces, if I’m right about Ironheart then Holo-stark isn’t on the cover. No Giant Man, No Sam Wilson, No Black Widow, No Scott Lang/Ant-man, No Wilson Fisk, who had a significant role. I get the requirement to keep the return of Bucky and Kobik a secret, but why no Namor or Black Panther. In the interior cover of the book, we have a list of major players in the group. There are 28 characters listed, only 4 of them are on the trade cover, and it’s not an exhaustive list, either.

Anyway, Cap deploys his Avengers as we cut back to the delegation. And where Cap is really, really f*cking stupid. Look, I didn’t notice before but this entire battle is taking place on the border to New Tian, this is significant because if you remember, Thor’s hammer is there. Anyway, back to Cap, the deal between them was that the mutants wouldn’t interfere with HYDRA’s rule in exchange for their own sovereignty, for keeping their cosmic cube fragment away from him, Cap’s withdrawing the deal and has hence made himself an enemy of AN ENTIRE ARMY OF MUTANTS ON NEW TIAN.

Including, and honestly especially Magneto, he is among the world’s most powerful mutants, and we see him tear through HYDRA’s forces. Hell, the entire designation tears through HYDRA’s forces, Zola and Cap fall  back, as Zola has a new weapon that could end the fight. The battle rages on with the heroes faltering, but Odinson’s decided to actually think for 2 seconds and turns his, surprisingly Thor-like axe against HYDRA. You’d think he’d have done that the moment he realised it was HYDRA.

Cut to Taskmaster and Black Ant having some awkward comedy. Hearing all the battle, and suspecting HYDRA might lose, they decide to switch sides and release the champions. Spider-man (Miles) webs them to a wall. HA! The Champions come out, finally joining Ms Marvel in the fight. Viv reaches out to Vision and tries to spread the virus into her, to lessen its strength and give her father a chance to fight it off.

Doctor Strange fights briefly against the Scarlet witch, summoning Lady Thor to deliver a finishing blow, she quickly reverts back to Jane Foster and Doctor Strange asks Sam to get keep her close but out of range of the battle. He begins a spell to extract Chriron from the Scarlet Witch. Zemo shows Black Panther ‘the army that sleeps’ a bunch of drugged up super-villains that Faustus has been making loyal to HYDRA. The 2 guards escorting them are taken out by the Winter Soldier, he and Zemo fight. Zemo shoots him through the shoulder, but Black Panther escapes and takes him down.

Bucky asks T’Challa to join the fight, he’ll take care of Zemo. Meanwhile Doctor Faustus has been trying to get Sharon Carter to comply, he reminisces over their history, before taking a sip of a drink Sharon’s laced with a non-lethal toxin. She’d built up an immunity to his mind control by listening to him for months after their first encounter. She uses the fact she knows Cap to hack into his computers and begin downing his war ships, somehow.

Zola shows Cap a project he’d been working on, a way of infusing a cosmic cube into basically iron man armour. Black Panther watches.

Back in the dreamscape, Steve is beginning to remember his life, she takes him to a waell where he can see Cap leading HYDRA, he realises that he’s just her memory of him, but she can make it real, Kobik says ‘he’s’ too scary and runs off, leaving Cap is the ground begins to shake. HYDRA warships fall as the battle continues but Black Panther tells everyone to run. Cap is joining the fight.

This issue is at least better paced, even if the plot progression you actually get is minimal since it’s mostly a giant fight scene. Cap’s now joined the stupidity train, and contrivances are still there. The random humour is still out of place, and the narrator is still annoying. Also, there’s a line ‘this is fun’ in this book describing the fight, and it’s not from the villains.

OK, the next issue is the last issue of the event but not the last I’ll talk about. Cap tells everyone to stand down and there’s a lot of talk that basically amounts to

“Surrender”
“We’ll never surrender”

So I’m skipping it, with most of the cosmic cube on his side, Cap uses the cosmic cube to rewrite history, making the Fantastic 4 (and Doctor Doom) HYDRA astronauts, Xavier and Magneto were hanged, HYDRA assembled the Avengers and experimented on Peter Parker to give him his spider powers, he changes the world, repairing the damage down in the fight, and making what he sees as a paradise but not everyone is gone. Bucky and Sam used their piece of the cube to prevent themselves being erased, along with Ant-man. Sam stands before Cap, cube fragment in his hand and surrenders it and his shield. Cap takes both and inserts the last fragment of the cube to complete it, but it’s soon gone. Scott returns to normal size, and Bucky comes out of a blue portal.

We cut to moments earlier where we see the pair shrunk and jumped into the Cosmic  Cube fragment as Cap finished it off. Days earlier, we hear Bucky’s plan, to have Cap complete the cube and have him come and try and talk Kobik into fixing the damage.

In the dreamscape, Steve looks for Kobik, eventually finding her in the daycare, she’s upset about what she’s done, the ground shakes again. He’s too strong, she’s gonna hide but Cap gives a speech, he’s been fighting fascists all his life, you don’t win by hiding, and it won’t keep you safe, you stand and you fight. A crack in the sky and the voice of Bucky allow them to come back. Kobik comes out and undoes Cap’s actions, basically returning the Capitol to ruin and restoring the heroes, and the not Nazi Captain America.

And this is an odd way of solving this… because now we have an actual Nazi Captain America to deal with as a villain, a person that the vast majority of the fan-base would rather forget about. The two fight, Steve getting his shield and using it against Cap’s blast. Cap is engaging at close range despite wearing discount Iron Man armour. They’re both tired and head for Thor’s hammer, unbeknownst to Cap, it had been enchanted by Madame HYDRA when he wielded it, but the enchantment’s gone and he can no longer lift it, but the true Steve Rogers can and smacks him in the face in a 2 page spread. I can’t deny it, seeing the real Cap back and kicking his ass is awesome, sad we had to go through so much awful to get there.

For reasons that make little sense, honestly, he gives Sam back the shield. Despite the fact we know Sam is going back to being Falcon in the then upcoming Marvel relaunch. He drops the hammer and now it returns to Lady Thor. Kobik restores some of history, mostly the HYDRA sh*t but keeps the destruction of Las Vegas intact because of reasons.

In an epilogue, we see a memorial for Black Widow. You remember the father who was arrested for being an inhuman way back? No, it had been a while at this point so I don’t blame you. He signs a waiver saying that he can’t hold the US government accountable and reunites with his son. They head home, finding their house vandalised and in a mess, they sleep but in the morning the rest of his son’s class are beginning work cleaning it up

I’ve got more to say about this issue, and the event as a whole, but we’ll leave that to the end, because I’ve got 1 more issue to cover. Secret Empire: Omega. An aftermath issue and straight away we’re back to the heavily stylised artwork that looks sh*t. We open at a place called the Shadow Pillar, a place that used to house dangerous despots, perpetrators of genocide, the very worst of the worst, but these days the cells are all empty, except for the one belonging to… I’m just gonna call him Captain Nazi to avoid confusion.

Steve has come to pay him a visit and on a 2-page spread you see their comparative history. Apparently, they’re having trouble pinning any crimes on Captain Nazi since he didn’t commit any. He was given position of world leader under a mandate, he was head of S.H.I.E.L.D. at the time, a position he’d been given, and he’d used that power to pardon him and his associates for all their atrocities. Steve says they’ll find a way which Captain Nazi scoffs at. Steve doesn’t really care about what authority, he killed people close to him, people that Kobik decided not to bring back for some reason

We cut to Natasha Romanoff’s funeral, Clint breaks down at her funeral and I think Carol and Old Man Logan take him away. Bucky is only watching the funeral from Mardipoor. He thinks about how he and Natasha also used to be a thing. But he’s not there to mourn, he finds out from an informant that there’s an assassination about to happen and every detail about it screams Natasha.

Captain Nazi tells Steve that he truly intended to bring everyone back with the cube, but things aren’t so easy to put back together now. We cut to New Tian, the city is being levelled by sentinels as part of their ‘negotiated’ surrender to the US government. Emma laments that despite her brief accomplishments here, she won’t be remembered as anything but a villain.

Steve says that making everyone loyal to HYDRA isn’t really living, no choice, history subverted and corrupted. Captain Nazi tries to argue his version of events, which we’re still told is an invention of Kobik. It doesn’t matter, there are people who still believe it, and will still fight for HYDRA. Steve says he’ll fight them like he always has, they’ll either end up in a cell or dead. Then we get some moral garbage about Captain Nazi killing the Red Skull and bla bla bla… this moral diatribe is getting boring.

The Punisher’s back to killing HYDRA agents when he’s spotted by Nick Fury Jr. OK, so Cap came here in part because after the battle, he tried to help a boy that was trapped but he flinched and pulled away. He came to realise this is what his life will be like now, he came to look in the eye of the man who destroyed it all. And he’s less than impressed.

Captain Nazi didn’t do anything impressive, he wore the face of Captain America, all he had to do was lie. As for his reputation. He’s told people before never to put too much trust in one person, to question authority and not follow blindly, this would show them why. He sees Captain Nazi the same way he would a Skrull or LMD, he leaves, with Captain Nazi giving another big speech with artwork that hurts to look at.

This Omega issue does provide something I like, which is the ultimate response Captain America gives to Captain Nazi. That he’s not entirely dejected by it, and sees the good that can come out of this.

But let’s be clear here, when it comes down to Secret Empire

THIS EVENT COMIC GIVES ME RAGE ISSUES

Turning Cap into HYDRA was a bad idea from the get-go. That doesn’t mean a good story couldn’t come out of it, but it means you have to put in the extra work to convince me that a good story is what’s coming. These 13 issues of misery do not do that. The artwork is sub-par throughout, passable in some places, outright atrocious in others, well suited to an indie title, but not a mainstream event comic.

I’m not high on the number of positives, the Ultron stuff was interesting and giving Ant-man and Bucky the chance to bring Cap back was the right move, the last few issues at least provided some engaging action. Yeah… that’s about it.

So, let’s begin with world-building, the first couple of issues had a fair bit of it, but to me it felt flat because it felt too sudden. The scene with the HYDRA reminded me of something Leviathan did in Batman Incorporated years ago, the problem is that in that book the school had not only been operational for years but it was in third world and isolated country, here you’re in a country full of people who until the takeover had the internet and everything that came with being a country that believes in free speech. I do not believe that schools and people would submit to HYDRA this quickly, Faustus mind-control or not.

But let’s look at our heroes. They basically meander doing pointless sh*t until the final battle. Who brought down the dark force over New York? Maria Hill, not one of our heroes. Who brought down the planetary shield? Quasar, a character who spent most of the book in a coma. Who brought down Steve Rogers, the one character that was in an entirely separate subplot for almost all of the book, Bucky brought him back, but he wasn’t even a character in the series until #8. Almost all of #2-7 could’ve been cut.

Then there’s the failed attempt at pushing so many of their newer diverse characters. I am not in the camp that dislikes them. I have expressed my like of Miles Morales, I was willing to give the Champions a shot, I still read Ms Marvel, despite some varying quality of late and I’ve run the praises of Lady Thor.

But here the attempt to push them screams marketing more than it does narrative. Not to mention the morally dubeous sh*t they get into results in almost nothing, sure Black Widow died but it's heavily hinted in the epilogue that she's back already! In the last few issues, the number of times they push Sam as the ‘true’ Captain America is sickening. Especially given, as I said, he was going to resume his identity as Falcon in the Legacy reset.

Speaking of Captain America, I get him being a bit downtrodden after realising what had happened but why was he so downtrodden in the aftermath of his victory, to point where he handed over his shield to Sam and threw the Hammer so Lady Thor could summon it. There’s very little of substance to this event. It didn’t feel as though it was a morally complex story despite their minor attempts to humanise Captain Nazi and explore greys with the Champions arc.

Certain characterisations make no sense. The Punisher and Odinson should not have sided with Cap, both of them would’ve had genuine reasons to not trust him, including and especially Cap’s associations with multiple mass-murderers such as Zemo.

And my god the narration, yes, we get it, the theme is hope, stopping pushing this over-dramatic bull on us. Narration should either be telling the story or be the inner thoughts of a character, whilst occasionally the latter is used, the narration never tells the story, it’s just being preachy and annoying.

Rating 3000x3 = 9000%