As Marvel's latest event saga approaches the end, we get a double dose of Hydra Cap. Captain America #25 marks the end of the separate Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson titles, and pits the two Captains against one another, all while Steve vies to plunge the world into further darkness, while Sam finds the strength to kick at the light. Meanwhile, Secret Empire #8 sees the resistance finally catching a break, as seeds that were sprouted early on in the story start to sprout. The payoff is huge. Writer Nick Spencer conjures moments of pure Marvel magic that feel bigger and brighter because he has set them against the grimmest actions of the Hydra régime.

The two issues read like a single story, so let’s have a look at what happens in both.

View Full Article On One Page, Or Leap To A Section:



Fire and Fury

Captain America #25 starts with Steve Rogers declaring war on Wakanda and New Tian. “[T]he axis of the world began to shift,” Spencer tells us, while Rogers' language echoes that of World War II, invoking the nations that rallied behind Hitler. Rogers’ speech, penned months ago by Spencer, might as well have been written yesterday.

RELATED: Secret Empire: What Does Worthiness Mean to Steve Rogers?

“For years… Wakanda has been a thorn in our side–proliferating…weapons of mass destruction…ignoring international law,” proclaims Hydra Supreme, who explains that he will no longer act in the same manner as “previous regimes” that were “willing to look the other way.”

Rogers warns that he is coming after the remaining Cosmic Cube fragments, then raises his fist in a Hydra salute. It is the first time we see him doing so as leader, and it is chilling.

The “war” is over as quickly as it begins. Emma Frost hands over her fragment immediately, and requests a face-saving ceasefire rather than an outright surrender. Wakanda falls, infiltrated by Doctor Faustus, who has allied with the rebel Zenzi, and has mentally manipulated T’challa’s subjects into betraying him.

Ever the white supremacist, Faustus reveals that he was allowed to test on Wakandans some approaches that Rogers would be “reticent” to try at home. A final insult has Zemo trampling the Black Panther underfoot, putting a sword to his throat, and daring him to resist.

Avenging and Assembling

While Rogers may have had the upper hand abroad, the tide is turning against him back home. After literally going underground, Sam Wilson returns as Captain America. His speech to the superhero community is rousing, at once a condemnation of what went wrong, and a celebration of everything that was right. “…we spent all our time fighting each other. Chasing big ideas that blew up join our face. Flying so high we lost touch of the ground beneath our feet…

“Best I can tell, none of it’s wrong,” adds the one-time social worker. Wilson is all about putting actions behind his ideals: “I look around here and see the men and women who stood up when Galactus came. When the Skrulls attacked,” he recalls some of Marvel’s greatest moments as he whips up his comrades to liberate the Inhumans held prisoner on New Atilan.

“These people–Hydra–executed our friends. They murdered an entire city. They've locked up millions. Are chasing after millions. Who wants to speak for these people? who’s going to be their justice? Who wants to be their Avengers?”

The speech does the trick, and the assembled head for the island prison, only to find themselves joining a revolt in progress. “…You had us pretty mapped for the whole ‘great liberators’ moment…” quips Tony, “It appears we’re a little late for the party.”

It is a humbling reminder that saviors don’t swoop down from above but emerge when people rise up against injustice.

Page 3: [valnet-url-page page=3 paginated=0 text='How%20Did%20the%20Resistance%20Get%20a%20Cosmic%20Cube%20Shard%3F%20Barf.']

Barf!

Fighting alongside Inhuman prisoners, the heroes find their stride and a renewed sense of purpose. They also discover that hope can come from the strangest places.

The uprising was made possible by Brian McAllister, the same Inhuman we saw coughing up a lunchbox in the pages of Secret Empire #1. It turns out that his power is regurgitating items he sees, but only small objects, and for altruistic purposes. After his fellow prisoners figured out how to remove his mask, McAllister threw up versions of the guards’ keys, allowing the inmates to free themselves.

RELATED: Secret Empire: 8 Characters Who Have Died (And 8 Who Still Might)

Upon learning of his power, Sam and A.I. Tony come up with a clever yet ludicrous plan, and ask McAllister to puke up a Cosmic Cube fragment.

There is something poetic about reducing a reality-bending artifact to vomit. The sheer ridiculousness of this moment against the backdrop of Hydra’s evil is a reminder that comics are pure escapism, and that we sometimes need a moment of silly fantasy to cope with darkness of the world.

McAllister’s superhero name is as ridiculous as his power. “Barf! Barf! Barf!” chant his fellow inmates, while Tony quips, “All the good code-names really are taken at the point.”

A Birthday Wish

With the cube fragment in hand, Tony begins to strategize. He’s already tested its wish fulfilment potential and found that it has granted him birthday cake, but not a body. He recognizes its limitations, but he also knows its strengths.

Having analyzed footage of Miles’ confrontation with Captain America in Washington he sees why Ulysses’ prophecy didn’t come true: Rogers was clutching one of his own Cosmic Cube fragments. Its reality-bending powers prevented Spider-Man from killing him. All of this provides the impetus for an attack on the Hydra’s seat of power, but there is one more wildcard.

Page 4: [valnet-url-page page=3 paginated=0 text='Namor%20Bows%20to%20No%20Man%20-%20Not%20Even%20Captain%20America']

Atlantis Rising

The first foreign power to have remitted a Cosmic Cube to Rogers was Atlantis. Facing the destruction of his kingdom and the annihilation of his people, a cowed Namor surrendered the precious treasure to Rogers and Hydra emissaries, but ever the cunning warrior, he had an ace up his sleeve. The mysterious guard who follows him everywhere is none other than Bucky Barnes.

It turns out that present day Bucky survived being strapped to Zemo’s drone and being sent back in time by Kobik. Not only that, but he was fished out of the water by Namor at some point after the explosion, either during World War II, or on the same day that Namor accidentally unfroze Rogers.

RELATED: Secret Empire #7 Reveals Whether Miles Morales Kills Captain America

The precise moment isn’t made clear, but the implication is that Namor has known for years that Steve Rogers was Hydra. “This is the only happiness any of this has brought me,” he gloats to Bucky. “To know that even as he sought to destroy me, I hid my greatest triumph over him in plain sight.”

The shocking reveal has tremendous implications for the Marvel universe as it currently stands, and puts its fate in the hands of the anti-hero who first appeared in that very first issue of Marvel Comics back in 1939. It also establishes Secret Empire, in part, as a fight between the original Invaders and their onetime leader.

With Spencer taking Marvel back to its roots with this event, it’ll be interesting to see what those foundations will look like in a few weeks, after the whole thing concludes.

Resurfacing

“We were sinking, ready to let go,” tells us the Enchanted Forest Steve as he drowns. “And then we saw it. A reason to keep fighting. Hope for the future.” He breaks the ropes that bind his arms and swims to the surface. Secret Empire #8 is all about resurfacing—literally and metaphorically—as our heroes find ways to really strike back at Hydra for the first time since the takeover.

Rising up means digging deep. And the story begins with Raz Malhotra’s time machine digging deep underground to broadcast a message from the future to the present, thus penetrating the planetary defence shield and the Dark Force Dimension dome over New York City.

The gambit works and the street level heroes in New York City, as well as the crew that is manning the Alpha Flight Station, learn of Sam Wilson’s plan to use a fragment of a Cosmic Cube to take down Hydra. High above the Earth, an exhausted Carol Danvers sheds a tear as Sam implores the heroes to assemble.

Wishing on a Star

As crazy as it seems, the plan is to have Sam fly halfway between the shield and the dome and to wish them both away, while the trapped heroes do their best to destroy the barriers that are imprisoning them.

In New York City, Doctor Strange has traded his Sanctum Sanctorum to the Librarian for a spell that would obliterate the darkness by amplifying the powers of Cloak and Dagger, the latter of whom is nearly dead.

RELATED: Somehow, Things Got Weirder & Darker in Secret Empire #6

Meanwhile in orbit, the Guardians of the Galaxy return, and Rocket proffers a nullifier bomb, stolen from Galactus that can bring down the shield. There’s only one catch: the team must crash the Alpha Flight Station into the Planetary Defence Shield to bring it down.

As Sam climbs into the sky with the fragment of the Cosmic Cube, he is pursued by Hydra fighters who shoot him down.

“We had one shot left. One hope still alive in our hearts,” we are told. “Imagine how it felt then to see it crushed so quickly.”

Page 5: [valnet-url-page page=4 paginated=0 text='Some%20Familiar%2C%20and%20Pivotal%20Faces%20Return']

The Beginning of the End

As Sam plunges into the Ocean—like Bucky and Steve before him—the station crashes into the defence shield and Stephen Strange casts his spell, but their efforts are for naught. Without the reality altering powers of the Cosmic Cube fragment, both of the schemes fail. “We succumbed to the darkness… We had allowed ourselves to believe again—and now we were being punished for it.”

Our heroes succumb to despair. But the drowning Sam, like the the drowning Forest Steve catches a glimmer of hope, in the shard of the cosmic cube in his hand. The fragment comes alive. The prayer of the sinking Captain America is answered, and he too rises to the surface, like his mentor and friend.

As Sam surfaces, things start to change, and the spark of the cube that saved him starts to have a wider effect.

“We got up again.”

In orbit, Quasar comes out of her coma. The Protector of the Universe, who got halfway to bringing down the shield the last time, goes all the way. In a blaze of multi-colored energy, Avril shatters the containment field and opens the door for Carol to go after the Chitauri eggs on Earth.

But it’s not the heroes who save the day in New York. Things are a little messier when it comes to liberating the Big Apple, and Maria Hill—the disgraced S.H.I.E.L.D. director whose Pleasant Hill experiment triggered the Hydra takeover—murders Blackout, the super villain who had been generating the Darkforce Dimension Dome, and who had been holed up in Sin and Crossbones’ prison.

“They’re going to be heroes again,” she explains as she prepares to pull the trigger, “But they need me to be somebody else.”

RELATED: Thunderbolts’ Secret Empire Reveal is Bad News for Bucky Barnes

As New York once again sees the light of day, the Kingpin looks up, satisfied. “We were rewarded,” we are told, “and all of us would remember for the rest of our lives, who led us there. Who inspired us. Captain America.”

For a brief moment Sam Wilson fully assumes the mantle of Captain America, but we already know that it won’t last. After Secret Empire and Generations wrap up, he goes back to being the Falcon. But at the present time, as the superhero community prepares to take on Steve Rogers and Hydra, the true Captain America is a man of color.

Bucky Returns

But there’s one more surprise in store as the Ultimates, Alpha Flight, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Defenders join the Avengers in preparing to take the fight to Hydra: Namor resurfaces and plays his trump card.

With his trademark arrogance, he brushes off Misty Knight’s jibe about handing his fragment of the Cosmic Cube to Rogers. “Pssh. I’m disappointed with you all,” he quips. “You truly believe the monarch of Atlantis would bow to Hydra?” With a flourish, and more than a little drama, he announces that he is on the verge of his greatest victory, and bursts a water bubble that reveals Bucky Barnes.

“Hey, Sam,” Barnes says to the astonished Wilson, “Heard you guys are looking for a plan.” But what can it be? And how long has it been in the works? If Namor fished Bucky out of the ocean sometime between the end of World War II and the day he discovered a frozen Captain America, and has known about Roger’s allegiance to Hydra all along, why has he waited until the present?

The fate of the world hangs in the balance. As the heroes prepare to go to war with Hydra, Zemo leads a handcuffed T’challa to his imprisonment or his execution, and Steve regards the fragments of his Cosmic Cube.

The Lonely Forest

The issue concludes in the Enchanted Forest. Steve encounters the ghostly blonde one last time, and rushes toward her pleading. He is convinced that she is Sharon, and flashes back to a memory of sitting on a porch swing, with his arm around her. It is a direct echo of his first encounter with the apparition, and the flashback to his mother’s death.

As he reaches out to touch her, the spectral presence fades. The women in his life are gone. Everyone in the forest is gone. “We’re all alone now,” reveals a weeping Kobik to the shattered Steve.

Have the glowing blue hues of the “Vanishing Point”—if that’s what it is—been a clue all along? Has all of this happened within the confines of a sentient Cosmic Cube? Is the fairy tale setting the product of an imagination of a powerful being has taken the form of a human child? Or is there something more at play here?

The Real World

In light of the tragic events in Charlottesville -- the neo-Nazi rallies, and the murder of peaceful protester Heather Heyer by a domestic terrorist -- Captain America #25 and Secret Empire #8 certainly hit close to home. The images of a fascist Steve Rogers spouting hateful rhetoric are disturbing, and so they should be. After all, this entire story is about the perversion of American values, and the appropriation of the iconography of freedom in the service of hatred.

People around the world have expressed outrage and condemned the eruption of hatred in Virginia by sharing images of Captain America punching out Nazis. They have found comfort in Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s iconic creation knocking down fascists. Chances are, that’s exactly where Secret Empire is heading. Wouldn’t it be amazing if it all ended with the real Captain America -- or Captains America (i.e., Forest Steve and Sam) -- punching out Hydra Cap in an homage to that first cover? That would be not only iconic, it would be cathartic.