Warning: contains spoilers for Black Cat #1!
Black Cat is up to her old tricks in her most recent Marvel comic, with her eye trained on a particularly lucrative cache for her personal, less-than-legal purposes. While the Black Cat is a professional thief who doesn’t need much help hunting down a job, she’s found the cache by exploiting the fallout of a controversial Marvel event that’s still affecting events in Marvel comics years after it ended.
Marvel’s Secret Empire event was less than well-received when it first hit shelves back in 2017. Many readers balked at the very idea of a fascist Steve Rogers, especially given real life events occurring at the time. The comics show a villainous Captain America, along with a Hydra-controlled SHIELD, using their combined powers and scrounged technology to overrun America. While the normal, patriotic Captain America was restored and Hydra given the boot, the damage to SHIELD (especially in the public eye) ultimately led to the organization officially closing its doors. This resulted in SHIELD locking up all of their storage facilities filled to the brim with shiny, sci-fi tech and enough cash to make even Scrooge McDuck jealous, handing it over to other groups, leaving skeleton crews to maintain it, or simply forgetting about it in the bureaucratic chaos.
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In Black Cat #1, it’s one of these storage facilities that’s caught the eye of the career cat burglar. Unprotected, the massive money cache is waiting and ripe for the picking. Except, as Black Cat points out, she doesn’t know where to find them - “But someone does.” She lies in wait with her goons and some stolen tech of her own, while another group of criminals find and clean out the stash of cash before jumping them in one of SHIELD’s underground roads. The theft of the theft ultimately doesn’t go to plan, though, thanks to a nasty interruption by the King in Black, Knull himself.
While heists are always fun, Black Cat’s attempt to snatch some SHIELD cash highlights a particular problem fans have seen crop up time and again since the end of Secret Empire and the closing of SHIELD’s doors. With all the technology and cash just locked away in secret facilities and no one left to guard it, some of it has managed to make it out and into the hands of criminals and antiheroes, like Deadpool (who raided SHIELD’s exotic weapon storage facilities in 2018’s Spider-Man/Deadpool #23) and Black Cat. In fact, SHIELD closing down has become the go-to reason for Marvel catastrophes, as writers take the easy reasoning for newly discovered loot or an abandoned project bubbling over. U.S.Agent #2, also out this week, sees John Walker on a mission to assist the former SHIELD team guarding an abandoned facility in Appalachia. Three years after Secret Empire, its fallout is still motivating plot developments in multiple up-to-date Marvel comics.
For a comic event as maligned as Secret Empire was, it still managed to leave some lasting effects on the universe, giving the fall of SHIELD a much more monumental feel when viewed in retrospect. The consequences of SHIELD’s closure are still being felt in comics years later, and, while it may benefit some characters, it’s certainly creating a hazard for more heroes and citizens. Black Cat #1 by Jed MacKay, C.F. Villa, Brian Reber, and Ferran Delgado is available now wherever comics are sold.
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