So that’s it for Marvel’s “Secret Empire”

[Spoilers for Secret Empire #10, which came out on Tuesday. Fans will have already read it. Non-fans wouldn’t read it on a bet.]

Marvel has finally wrapped up its Secret Empire line-wide event. I can see where Nick Spencer was going with the final issue, and in any other context it would probably have been fine and inspiring. But it’s all kind of lost in the face of the event having been, broadly speaking, poorly conceived, shoddily written, often dubiously illustrated, and ultimately mostly meaningless. Event lead writer Spencer kept arguing that we should wait until the end to see what he was driving at. Now that we have, it wasn’t worth the wait.

The idea of making Captain America a fascist Hydra sleeper agent (through the wonders of hand-waving deus ex Cosmic Cube fiat and largely resolved the same way) who takes over the United States (and tomorrow ze World!) is inherently repugnant on multiple levels, and would be difficult to creatively justify even if plotted better. But the execution of the idea was sloppy and ugly.

The story depends on way too much overly convenient magic to set things up — the Cosmic Cube itself, alongside a scheme to lock away significant portions of the MU’s heroes either off-Earth or under a done in New York. This makes for some interesting side stories, but from a higher view comes across as just poor self-serving writing.

The character sketching around Captain America himself at the beginning of the event did hold some interest, to me at least. Seeing the same sort of passion and dedication one associates with Cap aligned toward an awful purpose was fascinating. But by the end of everything, Steve Rogers was simply just another platitude-spouting super-villain to be knocked down, any psycho-drama shifted clumsily into melodrama for the “real” Steve Rogers who does the knocking down.

Equally shoddy writing goes to the arbitrary-feeling selection and shifting around of who was on what side, in particular, what heroes end up fighting on Hydra Cap’s team. Too much of it felt like “Whelp, let’s pick some at random that will pump up the drama, whether or not it makes sense.”

(As is usual with Marvel cross-over events, a lot of the participating comics were done better — looking at how the characters involved dealt with the stresses of a fascist dictatorship in the US.)

Few ideas should be off-limits to writing about, but ones that push that boundary need to be executed extremely well to demonstrate their value. This one failed badly on that account, making a bad situation worse, to the point of likely damaging Marvel’s brand in the process for a lot of comics readers. It would be nice to think that there will be some repercussions among the folk who approved this mess, but they seem to be already busy on the next big cross-over event.

I guess we’ll just have to see how that goes.

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