Secret Warriors #28

With this final issue, Secret Warriors ties up its loose ends and makes the case that it could endure as one of Jonathan Hickman's strongest works for Marvel. It is the bar all future Nick Fury stories with be measured against. Pity those stories. 
 
Secret Warriors is a series that I have been reading from the very beginning but haven't been reviewing. Due complex nature of the stories. reviewing this one an issue by issue basis as it went on just did not seem like something I could do. Every issue seemed like it gave more questions than answers, and my reviews would have ended up more speculation about what was happening than analysis of it. So I decided to wait until the end. 
 
Although this series is called Secret Warriors, the truth is that this book is a Nick Fury series with a very large and extensive supporting cast. It is important to understand that this is not a team book. This is a book about Nick Fury and the lengths he will go to in order to achieve his goals. Something like this has to be done in what appears to be a team book, because to really understand Nick Fury, you need to see how he affects the people he uses. You need to see who is better off for having known Fury and who tragically is not. These are the Secret Warriors, and their development is revolves around how Fury pulling them all into his secret war affects them. 
 
This issue is largely an epilogue to the series, featuring the last bits of fallout from Fury's secret war and touching on all of the surviving characters one last time. Having won his war, Fury surveys things one last time before exiting the stage, seemingly setting up a new status quo for himself rather than returning to business as usual. This is something Hickman has definitely earned. After everything he has put Fury through in order to get this far, he allows things to end on a morally gray but very uplifting moment for Nick Fury. It is a Happily Ever After moment, or as close to one that can exist in Fury's world. 
 
This story was originally intended to be told over the course of 60 issues, but Hickman chose to cut that in half due to concerns over the story's pacing and momentum. His reasoning was probably right, but that said, he also probably condensed this story too much. I think another story arc or two would have made this series much stronger, because there are a few elements of the story that are left underdeveloped. Leviathan, the third faction of the secret war, is the most important example of this. While Hickman does a good job at exploring the depth and complexity of HYDRA in this series, Leviathan is left rather ambiguous and barebones. We are never really given exploration about who Orion and Magadan are and what Leviathan really is. This leaves Fury's defeat of Leviathan kind of an underwhelming moment, because Leviathan really never came off as the same tangible threat as HYDRA did. Then there are the other two Secret Warriors teams. I understand Hickman says he always intended for Team Gray to appear and die in one issue. The abruptness of this does make plenty of storytelling sense. What about Team Black, though? It seems like the suddenness of Team Gray's coming and going would have been more effective if Team Black had been more fleshed out. But as it is, we are actually left with a much greater sense of who Team Gray was than who Team Black is. Finally, it seems like Stonewall and Slingshot get the short end of the stick in the series and do not get as much exposure and development as their peers on the main Secret Warriors team. All of this seems like it could have been rectified if Secret Warriors had ended on issue 38 rather than 28. 
 
There is a lot of bravery to Hickman's storytelling here. He tells a story without fear of needing to maintain some sort of status quo. Some people complain about death in comics. Death is not a problem in comics, though. Bad writing is. Characters die with purpose in this series. They die with purposes more substantial than ramping up the stakes and providing moments of cheap drama and shocks. Hickman earns these deaths. He justifies them in the story. Characters don't die to establish the serious stakes of the story. They die because this is a story with serious stakes. This is small but crucial distinction that a lot of writers don't always pay attention to. 
 
Alessandro Vitti and Stefano Caselli deserve a lot of thanks for doing everything they could to give Secret Warriors a consistent look throughout its run. It would have been such a shame for this series to have been bogged down by constant shifts in art styles from artists coming and going. This is not a series where every character can be identified by their colorfully distinctive costumes. Sometimes, it comes down to recognizing the difference between John Garret's and Dum-Dum Dugan's mustaches. So the consistency of art is really invaluable. 
 
There is something bittersweet about how Secret Warriors ends. It ends with Hickman essentially releasing all these characters into the wilds of the Marvel Universe with their new status quos. This is great, but where will we see these characters next? Will what has been established in this issue be respected and used by other writers? Hickman is moving on to the Ultimate Universe now, and there's sadly no indication if other writers have any interest in what he has done here. 
 
This issue ends one of the stronger runs of a Marvel series for quite some time. It's rare that you get a run with such a solidly planned out beginning, middle and most importantly, end. When many series end, they end because of cancellation and struggle to tie up what they can on their way out the door. This is not one of those ends. Even though Hickman's decision to cut this series short leads to some underdeveloped elements and there are some inconsistencies (I believe in the first half of the series Hickman cited the Great Wheel business happening only 20 years ago), Secret Warriors still stands as a very well done series and one of the best Nick Fury stories you could ever read.