Nick Spencer’s Secret Avengers has been a pretty intense bit of spy gaming, as it’s essentially a S.H.I.E.L.D. series which is likely in line for a renaming-relaunch with the upcoming Marvel NOW 2 thing rumored for late this year and the upcoming Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series. It does include most of the movie cast, although Maria Hill outranks Nick Fury Jr. at the moment. Then again, it’s doing enough of its own thing that it may just get to be all Avengery and secret.
Secret Avengers #8 is another great entry in the ongoing saga of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s lamentable skullduggery. The hardcore plan of theirs to institute the “reverie” programming – I.E. recruiting various agents and Avengers to pull off missions for them, and then using codewords to blank out their memories of said missions, thus protecting their covertness – has created mixed feelings in folks like Hawkeye and Black Widow. Now, one of the worst possible consequences of that kind of tactic is in motion – their master of disguise, Agent Bobbi Morse aka Mockingbird, is stuck behind enemy lines on A.I.M. Island after a botched assassination attempt on their Scientist Supreme Andrew Forson, and she has no recollection of how she got there, or why she’s in the form of an aging A.I.M. scientist named Harold Bainbridge.
She remembers who she is, but apparently nothing about her cloaking technology that’s allowed her to take this form… and thus, she’s starting to wonder if she’s secretly one of the Skrulls who held her prisoner for so long. This is actually a very helpful issue for me, as I have read very little of what the deal is with Mockingbird since she came back to life years ago in the Bendisvengers (wasn’t a big fan). She apparently has Nick Fury Sr.’s Infinity Formula, which I suppose is why she’s alive, although I’m not sure if it’s also supposed to explain why she can “dent steel doors with my bare hands.” Can Nick Fury Sr. do that, too, or have I missed something where she’s now super-strong? Anyway, her confusion manages to be gripping, as she’s trying to fake her way through the real Bainbridge’s duties while also trying to ascertain her true identity, and the intensity level shoots higher at the end when she’s expected to give a presentation to the A.I.M. ruling council, and she has no idea what it’s about.
Speaking of A.I.M. muckety-mucks, we get a closer look at what they’re up to as well. Taskmaster is making old robots train A.I.M. scientists to be soldiers while he plays ping-pong with Metallo, and while Yelena Belova looks on disapprovingly. She makes a detailed proposal to the Scientist Supreme Andrew Forson about how to shore up defenses, while he makes an indecent one to her which is immediately shot down, although there seems to be something more to his interest in her than simple prurience. Meanwhile, Graviton and Superia appear to be making a contingency alliance should Forson’s plans go awry, and we get a look at whatever the hell Jade The Entropic Man is supposed to be, which is a creepy, death-dealing guardian of “The Lost Truth.”
I really love what Spencer’s doing in this book, much like I loved the intense international intrigue he crafted with T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents a couple years ago. This is the kind of thing I find intriguing, hitting that mix of realpolitik with superhero exploits that we saw in books like Christopher Priest’s Black Panther, which is a series I like to mention whenever possible. The art from Luke Ross is very solid as well, although the fact that the A.I.M. inner sanctum and even Forson’s uniform sports a honeycomb design that hits that ‘beekeeper’ thing a little too hard if we’re trying to take this threat seriously. In every other respect, raising A.I.M.’s game is working very well.
Thank you, Secret Avengers, for giving danger cred to my favorite diabolical nerd cult.
