Secret Avengers #7 – Review

Nick Spencer (Writer), Butch Guice, Steve Epting, Brian Theis, Rick Magyar (Artists), Matthew Wilson (Colorist)

The Story: Maria Hill needs to take control of an operation that has gone too far, one that had been ordained by Daisy Johnson herself.

The Review: Back in the days, I only had a single thought when it came to S.H.I.E.L.D. as an agency in the Marvel universe: pity. When an antagonist needed to be shown as a big menace, S.H.I.E.L.D. was always there to provide token ”good guys” being beaten badly in order to set up a scope for the story itself. Rarely had I seen a series that took that agency as being particularly effective or being the actual source that is able to solve a problem.* Secret Invasion, Civil War, Marvel Boy, Captain America by Brubaker and so forth all portray S.H.I.E.L.D. as either being antagonistic or just plain ineffectual, which does not bode well for an organisation that is supposed to be the prime spy agency and the thing that binds the metahuman community together.

It’s a good thing then that some authors like Jonathan Hickman, Mark Waid and Nick Spencer came along to go a bit further in showing the prime spy agency as being actually useful or at least active in several parts. While the discovery of S.H.I.E.L.D. thanks to the marvel cinematic universe has been a boon to the credibility of the agency, in the comics format, Secret Avengers has been another huge bonus thanks to its direction mixing espionage, politics and super heroics.

This issue, in many ways, is a great example of just why this series can work, even though it has still some rough spots here and there. One of the best aspect, though, is the fact that they show how ”the spying game” is played, which makes for a pretty effective comparison to other superheroes book on the market and those made by Marvel itself. It’s a fun thing to see that despite the high action, the jokes, the big hero moments and all, there are other scenes which shows that they clearly cannot remain the supposed ”good guys” in the eyes of the world if they go en masse and attack a whole island without any backing from the U.N of the government. It was a very neat way that allow the readers to differentiates just how an agency like S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to work if they can get several important backing and so forth.