How Captain America Is Getting Past With Secret Empire

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Captain America #695, by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, on sale now.

Things haven't been great for Steve Rogers lately. As part of the whole Secret Empire bag-of-cats, he -- as in, the real Steve Rogers -- hasn't actually been active in the real world for over a year, and he's returned to find himself thrust into the boots of his Hydra-aligned doppleganger, smack dab in the middle of the global fallout of Hydra's takeover.

Or, well, theoretically, that's what happened. Captain America #695, Cap's first Marvel Legacy issue by the creative team of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, seems eager to move on from the whole Secret Empire era. So...what, exactly, does that mean for Steve's status quo?

How Did We Get Here?

The end of Secret Empire was, for lack of a better word, vague. It left a newly-returned Steve Rogers facing off, publicly, against the Hydra Steve that had been puppeteering the Marvel Universe from the shadows for just over a full year in real time. The actual logistics of that return were mostly undefined -- Kobik, the sentient cosmic cube responsible for the mess, was reformed to set things right, but that only went as far as literally reassembling the heroic Steve Rogers (apparently constructing Cap from her memories of him prior to her original manipulations) and course-correcting the history she'd altered in Hydra's favor. The actual fallout of the takeover -- the death and destruction that followed in its wake -- was left standing and fresh in the world's mind.

So, entering into Marvel Legacy, Steve understandably has more than a couple loose ends to tie up.

To briefly recap: The Hydra-aligned Steve is still standing, locked away in in a supermax prison (albeit one with apparently at least one Hydra loyalist guard) and the whole world is acutely aware that there are actually two Steve's on the map. Kobik has been completely missing in action since her cosmic do-over, and Steve's teammates and friends are, by and large, in disarray. Rick Jones, Natasha Romanova and Jack Flag are dead, either literally at the hands of the alternate Steve or by his order. The public, with only the loosest possible sense of what actually happened, justifiably is feeling a little wary of everything to do with Cap right about now.

However, in our first look at post-Secret Empire Steve, a brief moment in Marvel: Legacy #1, we saw that he's apparently not in all that big a rush to confront any of these problems directly and instead has taken a step back from the action to "find himself" without the pressure of the world's eyes on him.

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Where Are We Going?

You can't help but feel the urgency to move on past Secret Empire in Captain America #695. But for a couple of off-hand references, the issue actually doesn't broach any of the Secret Empire fall out on the table.

Instead, it opts for telling a story about a small town called, literally, Captain America, Nebraska. The town was renamed after Steve stopped a white supremacist group and saved a bunch of kids ten years ago.

Apparently undaunted by the fact that the Hydra-Steve had spent the last six months as a very, very public tyrant, the town gathers every year in July for an annual Captain America celebration, complete with costumes, fair games, a museum, and an environment of all around good cheer.

Interestingly, for all #695 seems reluctant to broach the topic of Steve's most recent past, it's eager to put a new spin on some deeper cuts. The flashback to Cap's heroism 10 years ago posits that rural Nebraska was largely unaware of who Captain America even was, much less that he was Steve Rogers.

This, with a little bit of comic-book mental gymnastics, does actually (sort of) jibe with continuity. Steve didn't officially go public with his identity until the early 2000s in real-time in the first post-9/11 run on his solo title. However, the context of the identity reveal was largely given that Captain America was already an extremely established public figure.

Needless to say, it was big news in the Marvel Universe.

In Legacy, it would seem, that while that reveal has obviously happened, people of course know who Steve Rogers is, but it's a rather recent development. On top of that, there's also some discrepancy as to whether or not people actually believe Steve to be the same Captain America from World War II.

In a conversation with one of the Nebraskan fair workers, Steve (assumed to be a cosplayer of Steve Rogers, rather than the real thing) mentions coming out of the ice. The fair worker responds by calling Steve an "icer" -- or, someone who believes the idea that Cap was reanimated in the first place, and not just a replacement who was hired to fill the role for the modern era.

It's a strange thing to call into question, given how much time has past both in and outside of the Marvel Universe since Steve was first re-established as a well known character, but the point is pretty clear. Rather than diving head-first into the quagmire of Secret Empire fallout, Waid and Samnee are making moves to look at just why it happened in the first place. What is it about Cap that makes him so universal and so individual all at once? Where are people (both on and off the page) coming from with the ideas of just who Steve Rogers actually is?

Steve may not know where he sits after his ordeal, but the town of Captain America, Nebraska certainly seems to have an idea -- even if it's one that may not be entirely correct.

It seems inevitable that the imprisoned Hydra-aligned Steve won't come back into play, probably sooner rather than later, and it would genuinely be a shame for the deaths of Jack, Rick and Natasha to go unacknowledged by Steve for too long, but this run of Captain America doesn't seem to be rushing to get there. Which, hopefully, given the general lack of good-old-fashioned heroism from Captain America runs even prior to Secret Empire --he spent the years leading up to it imprisoned in a pulp fiction-flavored alternate universe, then de-serumed and elderly -- will provide some much needed back-to-basics foundation laying before any of the heavy lifting gets done.