Secret Warriors #24

[sherkahn]

I confess, the raving love on the other boards for this title had me curious, as I had dropped out after a certain villain killed a certain hero. Boy was I wrong on my decision to drop this.
I've been scouring the web looking for more details as to what I missed, and am still filling in the gaps of knowledge.

Secrets shall be revealed. But in the meantime, one last strike.

Bits of #24 behind the cut.

*for the mods
1/3 for 24

Now, I originally WAS going to tie this in with #25 that is also out, but there are so many SPOILERS for upcoming issues of other titles involved that it's best not to, as this series is about to wrap up.




Recapping...

Hydra and Leviathan (secret Russian spy organization) are at each other's throats, with their factions dwindled down to small numbers. SHIELD teams have taken on both organizations to finally kill them off, with heavy losses on all sides.


The White Team is down.

The original super powered kids that Nick Fury had selected at the beginning of this title have either been killed, captured or unavailable.

#24 starts with Nick standing in the rain over graves....

Then the book transitions to One Year Ago....

Nick fury has always planned ahead. A contingency plan. If the White Team should go down, he goes to plan B.

Gather a 2nd team of super-powered youths.

Nick contacts his son Mikel in Moldova to lead the team. His son is eager for the task. First he recruits his telekinetic good friend (and part time con/thief) from Miami. (Think Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan from Ocean's Eleven).

Then an attractive young woman with unknown but valuable martial capabilities. Someone who could play in the big leagues, but has been asked by Fury himself to lay low until called. Someone who brings in the edge.

So the rest of the team is assembled.




The gearhead.

(Hope you S.H.I.E.L.D. readers are paying attention.)



The muscle.



The wildcards.

One Week Ago
The rest of the strike team is assembled, and sent out to strike down the Hydra base to take out the Hive.

It does not go well.

Two Days Ago

Not at all. In order to complete the mission, this brand new team that we have come to like in a matter of a few pages make the ultimate sacrifice, and Mikel Fury detonates the bomb miles beneath the Indian Ocean.

And then we are left where we began, but it's Nick at the graves of this young team, not the White Team... none made it back alive. And the spirit within Nicholas is broken, and Leviathan captures him without at fight.

For Nick Fury, the fighting is over.


*As a note, someone else PLEASE do #25, I can't break it apart without doing injustice to it

Comments

[auggie18]

...what.



This team is awesome and I want to them doing a million cool things forever and not be dead anymore.


Sigh.

[shadowpsykie]

wait what? Nick Fury is off the map again? the white team are the butterflies right? damn... i should not have stopped after Phobos/Alex went god of fear on the white house....

grrrrr

[doomisay]

I believe all 3 teams are "butterflies".

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

...it's codenames like 'Caterpillars' and 'Butterflies' that makes Secret Warriors so hard to take seriously as a spy series

[jarodrussell]

I'm reading these in trade format (because I like trades), and it's taking every ounce of willpower not to find a torrent. Hickman is so cool!

[halloweenjack]

So... basically, the first issue of Milligan and Allred's X-Force.

[lucky_gamble]

Gah what fake out for me. I really liked Sandra =/Already planning to buy an issue just cause of her.

[thanekos]

we'll never know what the hell an organic builder does.

(perhaps something with biotech, or creation of semisentients?)

[stubbleupdate]

Galileo's machine created another Earth

[proteus_lives]

I pity the fools who oppose them.

[big_daddy_d]

Well..wow. That is..pretty damn fucked up.

[silverzeo]

Team Mulder huh, guess he believes that his the father of baby...

[mrstatham]

It's really a shame that Secret Warriors has been one of the victims of the modern day trend in superhero comics that nearly every book that doesn't feature a really big character isn't going to last very long. Secret Warriors was cropped and culled from about sixty issues down to less than thirty, which is ridiculous, frankly. If Hickman is one of Marvel's biggest new writers, then they should've given him more time and issues, and not screwed him over by taking the series' original penciller away and putting him on Spider-Man.

As it is, SW is still a great series, but it's almost akin to the Prisoner in a non-deliberate way. Things are just getting more and more dense as it moves toward the conclusion. Still, it achieved an interesting character study of Nick Fury, I think. Taking him from the familiarity of SHIELD and the framework he had comfortably sat in for over thirty years was a bold move on Marvel's part, but it's only with Hickman that it's really bore fruit.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Eh, Johnny Guitar's death was sadder than the entire team's.

Hickman is doing good with FF, but he oughta stay away from spy stuff, because it's really not his strong suit.

[bewareofgeek]

I have to say that Hickman's pacing is really starting to turn me off. We've had three issues in a row now of flashbacks, but the key storyline hasn't actually moved at all.

In a very real sense, this entire issue was filler. The only critical bit was:

"Leviathan captures Nick Fury"

[icon_uk]

So Nick Fury takes an untested team of neophyte agents who have never worked together, assigns them what it likely to be a suicide mission on their first time out, and is particularly taken aback when they all die?

Sorry Nick, but if you chose to send them out like that, then you had to be aware of the risks.

I feel for Fury, up to a point, but I feel more for the poor sods who followed his orders (I'd say "followed him", but they didn't as he wasn't on the mission)

It's nice a job of building up and faking out, but that doesn't make me want to read the title.

[halloweenjack]

That's a very good point. Even Professor X (who's been established as sort of a manipulative bastard) went to the trouble to train his team and even shadowed the original X-Men when they went out on their first missions.

[terrykun]

This series, along with Victoria Hand's flashback, have pretty much cemented everything that makes Fury unlikeable for me. :\

The world isn't populated by people anymore to him. There are supplies, threats, and acceptable losses.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Err, in Hand's flashback she interupted a meeting with her own post-it notes, bypassing the chain of command. And given that she sided with *Norman Osborn*, I doubt she had anything worthwhile in her brief or whatever that was worth listening to and breaking protocol like that.

That's probably one of the few times Fury ever acted like a proper head of intelligence.

[terrykun]

Oh I completely agree that she went about it the wrong way, but I think her analysis of him was right.

[stubbleupdate]

This does look good.

I may well trade this title.

[valtyr]

Ditto; I have the first trade, and have been meaning to pick up the second, and this really makes me want to hurry that process up.

Also, I hadn't realised this was Hickman, I'm definitely going to check out Ultimate Thor now.

[jarodrussell]

I stopped reading after "The gearhead" because...SQUEEEEE! Are those plans for The Human Machine?!

Also, I don't have my trades of SW vol.1 and vol.2 with me, but wasn't one of Fury's recruits a technopath? Is that this guy? I already love this guy, btw.

[jarodrussell]

So of course he dies. DAMMIT!

Tag typo alert

[strannik01]

I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be "group: shield," not "group: sheild"