Secret Empire Was Not Worth The Controversy

“Worth” is a word with some complicated weight in superhero comics. Typically it’s used to describe the narrative heft of a story; it’s staying power -- a value of perceived and long lasting forward momentum. In a world commonly critiqued for being simultaneously endless and completely unchanging, this specific definition of “worth” becomes a pretty powerful motivating factor. Creators want to tell stories that aren’t immediately written off as flashes in the proverbial pan. There is an undeniable pressure to make a comic that is “worth it.”

Marvel’s controversial Secret Empire event, which saw the rise to power of a Captain America that was secretly an agent of Hydra, has drawn to a close. The story deftly dodged the fan dismissals that, historically and traditionally, a story about a Cosmic Cube would be undone by a Cosmic Cube. Secret Empire is a story that wants readers to believe that it has real, genuine weight for the Marvel Universe to come -- and, in that way, was a story worth telling, despite the criticisms, despite the controversies.

Unfortunately, this old, widely understood definition of “worth” really fails to acknowledge... well, just about anything else. And now, more than ever, we need to examine just what it’s missing.

Blueprints

Secret Empire, written by Nick Spencer and illustrated by multiple artists including Andrea Sorrentino and Rod Reis, may have only lasted the summer as far as the event series is concerned, but its building blocks were stacked across the Marvel Universe for more than a year ahead of the first issue. Plot elements like Kobik the sentient Cosmic Cube, Steve Rogers’ re-written Hydra loyalist history, Bucky Barnes and his team of Thunderbolts, and Sam Wilson and his struggle with the identity of Captain America all served to construct the spine of the event well in advance.

Now, on paper, this is a perfect idea. It establishes things like cost and stakes, sets up eventual payoffs, and teaches readers the “rules” of new characters with time to spare. However, in practice -- and specifically in the instance of this book -- it also creates a sense of expectation.

By spending so much time articulating its own logic and story formula, Secret Empire was writing checks that it would forgo cashing -- all in the name of chasing down its own worthiness.

Storytelling sacrifices started from the word “go.” Series ignition-slash-focal point Kobik was “killed” before issue #0, leaving the year-plus worth of buildup for her emotional arc benched before it could ever take center stage. This, in turn, left the predominant focus of the event to become a “fetch quest,” where a group of heroes hopscotched around the globe to find the fragments she’d left behind in an attempt to reconstruct her. Of this group, none of the Thunderbolts team that had spent the last year actually fostering a relationship with Kobik were represented -- they were all either left off screen or “dead” by the start of the event. The work that had gone into making readers empathize with Kobik’s unsolvable situation was shoved aside.

The more-than-a-year spent painstakingly detailing the revision to Steve Rogers’ history in Captain America: Steve Rogers -- issue #1 of which was the ground zero for the now infamous “Hail Hydra” panel reveal -- amounted to an only occasionally touched upon lifelong friendship between Baron Zemo and Steve. The mysterious new Madame Hydra named Elisa Sinclair had a role in the event that was ambiguous at best. The effect, apparently, of these flashbacks was to really sell readers on the fact that the Hydra loyalist was unquestionably the “real” Captain America -- and had always been the real Captain America.

Of course, by the end of the event, we would learn that that wasn’t actually the case...or was it?

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Logic Puzzles

The problem, of course, with leaning so heavily into the “authenticity” of Hydra Captain America is the literal origin of Hydra Captain America. Cosmic Cubes are some of the most omnipotently powerful macguffin objects in the Marvel Universe -- their rules are largely only vaguely defined to begin with, and get more and more complicated the further you attempt to dissect them. How do cosmic cubes work? What can and can’t they do? Why does it matter?

Questions like these are the enemy of stories that are quote-unquote “worth telling” because it means that really anything can happen and anything can be undone without fanfare. So Secret Empire had to make even more concessions to establish itself as something with staying power.

Despite the build-up and energy put into establishing Kobik as the unwitting, childlike scribe of Hydra’s “secret history,” the actual plot of Secret Empire made a 180-degree pivot into focusing on the things Kobik didn’t change. What had been initially sold as an emotionally wrought Cosmic Cube story about the ethics and complexities of sentient weapons suddenly became something else entirely.

Through the literal dehumanization of Kobik to a fragmented quest objective, it became progressively easier for Secret Empire to handwave that any reality manipulation had occurred at all. Instead, the weight began to rest on the idea that it was the system that was really to blame here, not the confused efforts of a god-child trying to win the affection of the adults in her life. The idea was hammered home relentlessly that, actually, no laws had been broken in Hydra Cap’s takeover of the government, the rules and the clarity of just what had and hadn’t been manipulated became increasingly esoteric, and the solution to the problem became increasingly full of caveats.

To “fix” Secret Empire, Kobik had to become a player in the story again, there was no way around it. But she had to do so in such a way that would allow the narrative to continue to shine a spotlight on its “worthiness” as a narrative -- she could only be permitted to provide a resolution to the plot inasmuch was convenient to that end goal.

Kobik returned in the final issue of Secret Empire and proceeded to not only craft a fully formed Steve from “her memories” of him prior to her manipulation of his past, but also correct reality only in a way that would both leave the body count and “teach a lesson” about the corrupt system and faulty government fail safes that allowed Hydra to take power in the first place. How, after spending upwards of 12 issues completely off screen hiding away in an extra-dimensional “Vanishing Point” she’d suddenly become nuanced and logical enough to dole out complicated morality lessons remains unclear.

But the final half-solution Kobik let loose by way of wrapping Secret Empire up might be the most telling of all.

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Seeing Double

It would seem that Kobik’s very grown-up wherewithal on the subject of death did not, in fact, extend to a very grown-up understanding on the subject of life. In “returning” the, uh, actual (?) Steve to his rightful place in reality, she left the Hydra Steve still completely corporeal, as real as ever.

It would seem that Kobik’s need to teach humanity a lesson only carried only carried her far enough to muddy the flood waters, but not far enough to actually build a raft. It’s at this point that Secret Empire completely drops all pretense of the narrative it had so tirelessly worked to sell from as far back as 2015.

The Marvel Universe is now home to two different versions of Steve Rogers and the authenticity of the good one begins to fragment like a Magic Eye puzzle if you look at it slant-wise for too long. Is he a figment of Kobik’s imagination made manifest? Is he just as manipulated as the other Steve, but in the opposite way? There’s no way to tell.

There was no payoff for the 12 issues worth of development that saw Bucky Barnes and his Thunderbolts team raising Kobik in secret, no passing mention of the story engine that was created by the ethical question of weaponizing children with god like powers, and a fantastic amount of run-sweeping about the actual semantics of a Cosmic Cube’s power. Instead, we’re left with Secret Empire's final proclamation -- it’s bellowed conclusory statement: that fascism is bad, and the things that put it in power are the systems we build for ourselves.

This, in the eyes of the story, is what makes it all worth it. We’re left with a thoroughly battered Marvel Universe, a status quo that’s been rocked to the very core and ultimately for the worse, and a series of scars that don’t get tied up into neat little bows -- all of which become testaments to the perceived importance of the story. And what's more, we get a pointedly topical message about real-world politics thrown in as both a bonus and added layer of justification, and it's counter to the message many critics were fearful it would be conflated with.

What it doesn’t stop to consider while it takes its victory lap is that these protracted consequences are neither revolutionary, nor are they necessary.

Ultimately, Secret Empire sacrificed every narrative leg it had built to stand on in order to make a grab for "worthiness" by teaching a lesson about the dangers of fascism to the Marvel Universe. Unfortunately, in the real world, it's a lesson that many people are living in their day-to-day lives. And worse yet? It did so at the cost of calling into question -- both on and off the page -- a hero who should be at his most aspirational for the people who need him now more than ever.

So, is Secret Empire a story that won’t soon be forgotten? Sure. Does it have a lasting set of consequences that’ll feed into the Marvel Universe down the road? It’s more than likely. Did it succeed in circumventing the expectation that everyone will blink and be okay again? Absolutely.

But after all that, at the end of the day, was it actually, genuinely worth telling in the long run? Was it still worth it after it so flagrantly swept its own internal logic out of the way when it became inconvenient? Did it tell a story that was actually worth hearing?

Unfortunately, no, it really didn't.