Written by Jonathan Hickman
Illustrated by Alessandro VittiIgnore everything you’ve heard about when this series is ending! IT’S NOT THIS ISSUE. Jonathan Hickman lost his mind and wrote too huge an ending to just be contained in ONE ISSUE! Join us this month for the PENULTIMATE issue of SECRET WARRIORS! It’s Wheels within Wheels, Part 4: I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD
Matt is going to fire me for this review. Why? Well, you’ll have to find out after the jump, won’t you?
Well, that’s that, isn’t it? The first seven pages of Secret Warriors #27 make it plain that the next thirteen are all about tying up the loose ends now that Nick Fury has cut through his own personal Gordian knot — one, it turns out, he’s largely tied himself up in. We knew Secret Warriors was a finite series nearly from the start, but even with that expectation in mind, that the climax of things comes so early… well, it’s hard not to view everything after as an epilogue, an issue-and-two-thirds-long post-credits scene.
As a single issue, then, the pacing is not what we’re accustomed to; however, if any series Marvel currently publishes (for another month, at least) is meant to be read in large gulps, it’s this one. Call it the 100 Bullets effect, if you like — things seem skewed and sudden when viewed in discrete 20-page segments, but united as a whole, the macrorhythm reveals itself, like pulling back to see that the shadow next to your rowboat is really the shape of a whale. Or Jaws. Whichever. At this point, dip a toe in at your peril.
Throughout the whole run of Secret Warriors, Nick Fury has done his best to elude the reader’s grasp. Of course, that’s the price of being the world’s most vaunted super-spy — emotions and feelings and all that place a distant second to things like missions and targets. Nick Fury has to stay at arm’s length for us to believe that he’s in complete control; otherwise, we’re too in on the joke, and the punchlines are spoiled. On the other hand, when that control does not seem well and truly complete, all we’re left with is a character stuck at arm’s length. I noted that the climax of the issue — and indeed of the series — comes within the first seven pages; most of that is spent rehashing what was on the last page of #26, and then Nick is gone and we’re left to watch the other characters pick up the pieces and try to keep up with him.
The emotion, then, in Nick Fury’s master plan — Secret Warriors‘ and Hickman’s master plan — is BYOB. Sure, we’re given broad stripes, spoken without subtlety or shading — “I do love attention,” one character notes after deliberately getting themselves surrounded by armed federal agents. Still, reading this payoff to the series in isolation, it ultimately feels hollow: one last twist for the road, with no time to dwell on it. (Maybe that’s #28, but I honestly expect the final issue to be more of a “BOOM, TWISTED AGAIN” kind of affair.) Nick Fury avenging his son gets a glib, gruff speech like we’d expect from the old man, but all we get is what we expect. To actually feel for him, or feel anything about the big gundown, means bringing your own familiarity with Fury and his enemies to the table and sorting out what it means to you from there. Alessandro Vitti’s art certainly adds no particular weight, although he’s more than competent at drawing scowls and violence — it’s just that we’ve gotten so accustomed to the scowling and the violence that, well, it just feels like more of the same. I’m honestly not sure what reaction the whole thing was meant to engender other than “cool!”
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That notion — “cool!” — points us back toward what I would argue as Secret Warriors‘ most direct ancestor: The Authority. Back in that book’s glory days, it was okay that the characters were paper-thin (if that) and things like development and subplots were violently excluded; Authority was all about the spectacle, and how cool it’d be to see a bunch of quasi-fascist superheroes demonstrate that with great power comes great control. The Authority, however, was a series of four-issue bursts, never risking tripping over its own shoes, never trying to think too hard or pass itself off as too clever. (Well, maybe the end of the Millar run.) In short, it was not a spy-conspiracy story, which Secret Warriors nominally is. That’s the problem. Secret Warriors is the structure and pacing of 100 Bullets wedded to the subtlety and complexity of The Authority, when it really should have been the other way around.
We’ve come to the end of the grand mystery, then, and it goes out with both a bang and a whimper. In the end, we’re only left with more questions, like “how the hell did Nick Fury pull off this latest revelation?” Of course, the answer will likely just be “by being Nick Fury, that’s how,” which will only underline the point that stuck out to me here: we’re at the end of all this and we still don’t know a new thing about him. We’ve marched with Fury through every 270-degree turn Hickman could muster, but he’s still, as noted, at arm’s length, scowling. There’s one issue left to pull the nose of the plane back up, so let’s hope that these guys made good use of it. Otherwise, I’m just left with “so what?” sticking in my mouth like an aftertaste.
Final Verdict: 5.5 / It got an extra half-point for the eerie timeliness; you’ll know what I mean if you read it
