Marvel pulled a big move when they “revealed” that Captain America was a sleeper agent for Hydra. Now in truth, his history was changed via a Cosmic Cube to make him think that, but he didn’t know that. Then, through the last few months, Steve Rogers has been building an empire led by villains and Hydra loyalists. This all got spearheaded via the Secret Empire event which started last month with a #0 issue, and then continued with Secret Empire #1. The twist here was that while Secret Empire #0 show Captain America revealing who he was and implementing his takeover plan, Secret Empire #1 jumped ahead a few months to show us just how complete his victory was.
The writer of the recent Captain America books and Secret Empire books is Nick Spencer, who talked with IGN about why he did the event his way:
“I was always a big fan of stories like Man in the High Castle, or even in the Marvel universe we had done stories like Age of Apocalypse or Age of Ultron that had shown villainous take-overs of various kinds, but they were usually alternate realities or alternate time lines, things like that,” Spencer told us. “So a big part of my pitch was ‘what if we really do it this time?’ What if the bad guys win, and there’s a jump in time, and then we see what the country and what the world looks like after they’ve won?”
Another key moment was that at the end of Secret Empire #1, Steve Rogers ordered the destruction of a city who was openly supporting the resistance. And Spencer notes that won’t be forgotten when this is over, “if you think that the ending is everyone smiles and says ‘no hard feelings’ or forgets that anything bad ever happened, that’s just not the kind of story that I like to do.”
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