SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Secret Empire #10, by Nick Spencer, Steve McNiven, Rod Reis and more, on sale now.


After ten tumultuous issues, Marvel Comics' Secret Empire has finally come to a close. Captain America has been defeated by Captain America (Really!), the mystery of the Vanishing Point and the Generations one-shots has been explained, and the future looks pretty bright for Marvel and the legacy of its heroes.

RELATED: Secret Empire #10 – How the Heroic Steve Rogers Returns

But as the dust clears and the rubble settles, it's time to take up the unpleasant task of calculating just who made their triumphant return during the catastrophe... and who didn't fare quite as well.

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Rick Jones

One of Secret Empire’s first and most shocking deaths was Rick Jones, Silver Age Avengers mascot-turned-sidekick, brief Bucky Barnes stand-in, and former Hulk-powered superhero. Rick may not have been an A-List hero, but you’d be hard pressed to find a character with more deeply rooted connections to the original Avengers line-up.

Rick-Jones

Rick was revealed to be the hacktivist called “Whisperer” who brought S.H.I.E.L.D’s experimental “Pleasant Hill” initiative and “Project: Kobik” to light during Avengers: Standoff!, which played a direct role in the lead up to Secret Empire’s tangled web. And while this was a truly noble effort and a genuinely heroic cause to take up, it very quickly came back to bite him.

Unsurprisingly, Rick was immediately captured and imprisoned by Hydra after Steve’s plot came to light and the government collapsed. When he refused to play ball with the country’s new overlords, Steve was forced to do something about it -- brutally and publicly. Rick was executed by firing squad at the hands of Hydra in Secret Empire #1, but it looks like Kobik's reconstruction of the world may have brought Rick back into the fold...but with some pretty nasty memories completely intact. However, Rick's presence is notably absent in Marvel's post Secret Empire solicitations, so his future is anything but certain.

Bucky Barnes

After spending the last year (and a full 12 issue run) as leader of the Thunderbolts where he and the team made it their mission to protect Kobik from the looming threat of the outside world, Bucky was killed off in...well, the exact same way he was killed off back at the end of World War 2. He was strapped to a rocket and fired off into the horizon -- Or, well, that’s sort of how it worked. After falling victim to cosmic temper tantrum care of Kobik, Bucky found himself transported back to the 40s, with all his knowledge and memory from the present day still intact. This, in Kobik’s mind, was the key to making Bucky see things her way -- if he could just align himself with Hydra in the past, everything would be okay.

Naturally, that isn’t quite how it went down. Rather than submitting to Kobik’s naive logic, Bucky resisted and was unable to change his own fate. Baron Zemo captured him, strapped him into his death trap, and fired him off into the sky. But Kobik couldn’t stand to see her friend and playmate killed and intervened yet again, resulting in a giant shattering of reality around Bucky just moments before his death as the rocket exploded.

For about five months (or seven issues of the main event series,) it was assumed that Bucky had died, but issue #8 presented a shocking revelation: not only had Bucky survived the explosion -- he’d done so with the help of Namor. Bucky’s rocket had landed him, injured but alive, in the ocean where his former Invaders comrade had found him and spirited him away back to Atlantis, where Bucky has worked as his personal guard in secret for “years.” It’s still unclear, thanks to Kobik’s manipulation, exactly how many years Bucky has been lying in wait for the right moment to reveal himself, but the Thunderbolts insignia on his metal arm seems to indicate that his own personal history is still intact.

Bucky survived and played a major role in taking down the Hydra corrupted Steve, but his presence is decidedly missing from Marvel’s upcoming slate of solicits, so where he’s going to end up now is anyone’s guess.

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Natasha Romanova

Natasha’s role in Secret Empire has been two fold, as both spy and teacher. After Steve’s Hydra trap was sprung on the country, Nat immediately sprung into action with a plan: she was going to kill Steve Rogers, no ifs, ands or buts. To do this, she was going to enlist the help of the Champions, putting them through her own “Red Room” style boot camp and sending them out in covert missions to gather intel and undermine Hydra in the process.

Unfortunately, her plan didn’t go over all that well. The Champions trust in her was tenuous at best, so a string of dangerous and incomprehensibly clandestine missions almost immediately forced the group to splinter, leaving Nat working on her own.

Nat was killed by none other than Hydra Steve Rogers as she attempted to assassinate him on her own. A brutal blow to the neck from Steve’s shield killed her instantly, as her friends and former teammates looked on in horror.

Despite that, Secret Empire #10 made it seem like Natasha had been brought back to life by Kobik's mending of reality, but the specifics (and the certainty) of her return look to be anything but solidified. If she is back and in one piece, it sounds like her memories of death and her time spent plotting Steve Rogers' assassination will all still be kicking around her head -- which might make things a bit troublesome for the future.

Bruce Banner

A casualty from Marvel’s last major crossover event, Civil War II, Bruce Banner has been out of the picture for a couple years now. Most recently, the Uncanny Avengers were pulled into a plot where they learned that the Hand had imprisoned the good doctor’s soul in the astral plane, forcing his body to become a zombified Hulk puppet, beholden to their magic. Doctor Voodoo was forced to step in and exorcise Banner’s spirit, supposedly “killing” him for once and for all.

bruce-banner

However, the team made the unfortunate mistake of turning Banner’s corpse over to Captain America, who, unbeknownst to them, had been manipulated and transformed by Kobik to be a life long Hydra loyalist.

Just how Steve was able to resurrect Bruce remains unclear, and the use of the Ultimate Universe's mixed-case font has led to a number of theories about which Bruce it is, but Secret Empire #6 revealed that he was not only alive, but Steve’s captive-turned-weapon. When backed into a corner, Steve forces Bruce to become the Hulk and points him in the direction of the Avengers’ resistance. It goes about as well and as brutally as you might expect. The status of the Hulk after that encounter remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say that Bruce Banner is definitely back on the map.

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Ultron Pym

After fusing with Ultron, Hank Pym became an even more brutal thorn in the side of the Avengers. Now, when Ultron would drop in to ruin everyone's day, they were no longer able to reliably tell whether or not they were dealing with their life long friend (or ex-husband, in Jan’s case) or a megalomaniacal robot trying to manipulate them.

Ouch.

This conflict came to a head in Uncanny Avengers when Ultron Pym attempted to reintegrate himself into the human world only to succumb to Ultron’s influence and stage a massive attempted take over. (Surprise!)

The Uncanny Avengers team was forced to deal with Ultron Pym like they have historically dealt with threats of that level before -- by sending him into space. Johnny Storm used his power to melt the metallic parts of Ultron’s body into the control council of the ship, which the team then sent on a collision course for the sun after they were safely pulled from the makeshift trap by Captain Marvel.

There aren’t many characters in the Marvel Universe who could survive being sent directly into the sun, and for a while, the Avengers assumed they had rid themselves of Ultron (and, unfortunately, of Hank Pym) for good -- But Secret Empire #4 revealed that at some unspecified time, Ultron Pym had actually returned to Earth a while ago.

Apparently, Ultron Pym had set up shop up near the arctic and had been quietly building himself a variable army of Ultrons, enough to populate a strange and uncanny little Ultron-exclusive country. What’s more? This was apparently something that did not go unnoticed, both members of the Avengers resistance and the Hydra-controlled US were completely conscious of Ultron’s presence, but had struck a sort of tenuous balance -- a sort of “we won’t bother you if you don’t bother us” treaty.

So far, Ultron Pym has honored this agreement without issue -- he even cheerfully handed over the Cosmic Cube fragment he'd been holding on to when the Avengers and the Hydra Avengers showed up at his doorstep -- but it’s pretty doubtful that things will stay peaceful forever.

Mosaic

While not an official death or return, the Inhuman Mosaic hasn’t really been up to much lately. So, you can imagine it was kind of a surprise when he turned out to be a major reveal in Secret Empire #7. Apparently, at some point after the end of his solo series, Mosaic found himself trapped in the body of an old man and imprisoned by Hydra within a secret base.

Part of Natasha’s plan with her “Red Room” Champions was to free him -- a gambit they actually pulled off, surprisingly, releasing Mosaic from his bodily prison and managing to flee the base with their lives.

Mosaic then, apparently, helped Natasha make her ill-fated strike at the Hydra Captain America -- but where he goes, or what happens to him after that whole debacle is completely up in the air.

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Blackout

Before Secret Empire, relatively minor-level villain Blackout made his home in Pleasant Hill, where he was brainwashed into believing he was just an ordinary civilian living in an ordinary town. Unfortunately for him, he was one of the few villains who survived the collapse of Pleasant Hill with his brainwashing still very much intact -- a flaw that the Hydra Captain America capitalized on as he made his initial move on the continental US.

Hydra Steve manipulated the brainwashed Blackout to, well, blackout all of New York City to isolate and alienate all the heroes contained within, sequestering them away to a sort of dark dimension while the rest of the country collapsed. Street level heroes like The Defenders spent the majority of Secret Empire fighting for the isolated NYC, unable to make contact with any of their allies. So of course something had to be done before the Avengers resistance could really operate at full strength.

It turned out that “something” was Maria Hill, who infiltrated the blacked out NYC and found the brainwashed Blackout, still living his life in relative suburban comfort, and executed him.

Blackout’s death brought the dark bubble around NYC crashing down, which was obviously the intended effect, but how the Avengers will feel about an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D acting as judge, jury, and executioner when the dust settles is still yet to be determined.

Kobik

The lynch pin of Secret Empire spent the majority of the event...well, maybe not dead, she was never really “alive” in the first place, but certainly out of commission. Kobik was shattered into tiny cosmic cube fragments around the same time Bucky Barnes was killed, leaving her as good as shelved for about 9/10ths of the story.

However, across issues #9 and #10, it was revealed that the sentient part of Kobik had indeed survived the trauma of being broken up into tiny shards, and was hiding away with what remained of the non-Hydra Steve Rogers in a dream world she’d made to keep herself safe. Once her shards were safely joined back together into a whole cosmic cube, however, she was able to return to her cheerful adolescent self and fix just about everything that had ever gone wrong over the last year or so.

What comes next for Kobik is still a major question -- she ended Secret Empire perhaps a little emotionally worse-for-wear, but still very much alive and kicking, which means that her abilities and the threat she poses to reality is still decidedly looming.