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“Secret Warriors” #24

By | October 16th, 2018
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Jonathan Hickman, maybe more than any other current writer, has picked up a reputation for intricate, densely plotted, structurally complex stories. A recent read-through of his first long-form work, “Secret Warriors,” showed me all of that, but one issue in particular stuck out for being the shining example of why his approach to storytelling works. Read on for my analysis of this issue, but know that there are major spoilers for both the issue and the issues immediately preceding it.

Cover by Paul Renaud
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Illustrated by David Marquez and Alessandro Vitti
Colored by IFS
Lettered by Artmonkey’s Dave Lanphear

As the long fight between the Secret Warriors and Hydra draws to its inevitable conclusion, Nick Fury’s final wild card is revealed. Just who are the members of Fury’s third covert team and what have they been up to all this time?

In order to fully understand the impact of this issue, let’s first go through an overview of the series thus far. The basic premise sees Nick Fury, a hardened old soldier and former leader of a covert spy organization, gathering a young team of superpowered humans who have not become public knowledge yet. This team is known as his “caterpillar team” (a team he would incubate into “butterflies”) and are the main characters of the series. At least, it seemed like they would be at the start.

As the series progresses, it dovetails into a dozen different directions. One arc focuses on just one member of the caterpillar team, one focuses on the competing villainous organizations undoing each other’s plans, one completely ditches the caterpillar characters as Fury reunites with his old war teammates. We see another caterpillar team slowly come together, and we see our primary one fall apart. With all these seemingly unrelated events happening, your brain starts to compartmentalize the information and pick it up in a different way than in consuming other fiction. You learn to pick up the tiniest beats that Hickman throws at you and put them together into this giant jigsaw puzzle even without knowing what the final picture will be. Hickman makes you work.

In a particularly cruel move, issue 23 shows what fired team member Sebastian has been up to over the last six months, showing him completely reinvent his mind and body so he can get back and join the team again, only for the team to be disbanded by the time he finally gets there. We just built up this entire story and got excited to see it continue, only to throw all of it away by the end. So after experiencing 23 issues of nonstop dense storytelling, it feels like the main story could be anywhere, with anyone. Issue 24, however, finally gives us the answer on what this book is truly about. And how does it do that? By introducing a completely new team of characters, then immediately killing them all off.

The main portion of the issue sees Mikel, Fury’s son, gathering a new caterpillar team of his own. This happens between a framing sequence drawn by Alessandro Vitti, one page at the beginning and three at the end, where a devastated Fury is standing in a dark, rainy graveyard. At first, we only see two graves but don’t see the names written on them, so we’re left to believe it’s the two teammates who died a few issues ago. The following eighteen pages, drawn by David Marquez, are some of the densest in the series. We get introduced to seven separate characters, two to three pages at a time, where we get a full idea of who each character is. Immediately after, we see their mission debriefing, and on the page after that, all but the two leaders are dead. And then those two self-immolate. We don’t even see the mission, just the fact that it ended badly. Everything is a blur of tiny, semi-meaningful vignettes that quickly become irrelevant. And that brings us back to Fury, revealed to be at the graves of the team, finally telling a group of enemy agents, “I’m done.”

As mentioned above, if you’ve read the book up to this point, your brain figures out a way to organize the vast amounts of information you get. This person is from this place, they have this power, they have this background, they have this motivation. Marquez’s art develops each of these people into full characters with their own quirks and poses and ways of carrying their faces. Bits of humor solidify each of their personalities in your mind, and they are a truly diverse team in gender, race, and background. One is a wacky inventor who loves conspiracies and has picked up the work of Galileo, one is a direct descendant of a mythological demon-slaying king, there’s a sibling pair who can duplicate themselves and use it to rob banks. By the end of all the introductions, you can’t wait to see how they fare on missions, how they interact with the rest of the book’s vast cast of characters. They could even support their own spin-off book! But, they all die before you even get to see them in action. So much potential is lost, as all the work Hickman and Marquez did to build this huge team from scratch is thrown away. It’s also a damn cruel thing to do to the reader who has spent all these pages poring over every last bit of information so they could follow what came next.

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It’s not as cruel as the pain of losing your son, of course, but that is sort of what the book comes down to, and why it works. The final few pages, showing Fury at the graves of the team, including his son, and giving up to his lifelong enemy, are devastating because we feel something that can relate to what Fury has felt. We’ve been there with him on these 24 issues of building and subsequently destroying everything, watching the first caterpillar team rise and fall, then watching Sebastian in issue 23 rise and have his potential cut off, and yet again here as we get introduced to a large, truly interesting team that we will never get to spend more time with. There’s a compound effect. It hurts because we’ve been devastated so many times, and we just want things to work out okay. That’s exactly what Fury feels. The repetitive devastation has finally caught up with him. He’s done.

And it’s at exactly that moment that we realize what “Secret Warriors” is about. It isn’t about the caterpillar teams. It isn’t about the many international espionage teams vying for power. It’s about the journey of one man and his never-ending series of failures in a never-ending war. There are only four more issues in the series, which bring everything to light and throw in a few final plot twists, but make no mistake: this is the issue where the book’s larger meaning shows itself.

Hickman is a once-in-a-generation sort of writer, willing to play the long game and hit you in a way you never could have expected. His use of structure to tell his “Secret Warriors” story is genuinely unlike any other I’ve read, and it comes highly recommended. Just make sure to adjust your expectations, go with whatever he throws at you, and trust that the dude knows what he’s doing.


//TAGS | evergreen

Nicholas Palmieri

Nick is a South Floridian writer of films, comics, and analyses of films and comics. Flight attendants tend to be misled by his youthful visage. You can try to decipher his out-of-context thoughts over on Twitter at @NPalmieriWrites.

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