In the second issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers, the whys and wherefores of Steve apparently being a big fat lifelong Hydra spy are revealed.

Super-Soldier. Avenger. Agent of Hydra. Let’s cut to the chase. We’ve been waiting a whole month for this, and we want answers right now. Thankfully, Marvel provides, in Nick Spencer and Jesus Saiz’s new update of Captain America: Steve Rogers.

Previously, in ‘Captain America: Steve Rogers’…

Well, basically, in case you’ve been living under a rock, Steve was revealed to be an agent of Hydra after pushing one of his current sidekicks out of a plane. This plot twist was one of the biggest comic book controversies of all time, with reactions ranging from detached curiosity to legitimate heartbreak to fury at a potential shock-value gimmick to completely uninformed histrionics full of factual inaccuracies. There was plenty of smug gatekeeping from old-school comics fans, the creative team received harassment including death threats, notable comics journalists took sides. Creators closed ranks, in a way that was both understandable and ultimately unhelpful in diffusing the situation. It also got memed to hell and back. Memes aside, people on both sides got very mean, very condescending, and very relentless. The hype certainly spread beyond the usual comics readership – with Captain America (and Hydra) so prominent in the MCU, fans of the character in all his formats weighed in on this massive upheaval, projecting their own ideas of what it meant. It’s honestly one of the worst environments I have ever witnessed in fandom, a real mob mentality, and I feel things that got shaken out during the past few weeks are going to weigh heavily on all sides for a long time.

My take, for the record, is that I don’t love it. I can’t imagine what story could possibly need this to happen in order to glorify Steve Rogers, which is what the book is for at the end of the day. But I’ve already written about why I trust Nick Spencer as a writer, and I believe that however he gets Steve out of this, it’s going to make the character stronger and more noble and more lovable than ever. I also believe that we cannot restrict the content of any stories — we can not demand that something, anything is not allowed, a total no-go zone. If we start doing this, it’s a slippery slope into serious censorship — artists must be free to create their art. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to buy it. But you cannot demand they stop making it, or the sanctity of all art is ruined. That doesn’t mean I approve. It just means that I cannot outright condemn. However, the behavior from both factions, pro and con, surpasses any personal feelings I actually had on the story. I’d like to hope I’ll never see something like it again — every single person involved must strive for a better handling of their opinions and reactions, because yikes. Double yikes.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on. If you want to know how the big reveal went down, read last month’s recap. This month: not forward motion, but some very clear answers.

I want to break Steve Rogers — I want to shatter his very soul.

Captain America: Steve Rogers #2 does not disappoint insofar as upholding the promise made by Spencer that all would quickly be revealed about how and why Steve became Hydra. If Steve Rogers #1 served as the origin story that Steve thinks he lived, then #2 is the real deal — the entire narrative is a monologue from the Red Skull, addressing an absent Steve and revealing to the audience precisely what was done to him. As he gleefully reflects on the prospect of Steve’s world coming crashing down, it’s immediately made clear that Kobik — the sentient child born of cosmic cube fragments, who S.H.I.E.L.D. used to alter the identities of individuals in Avengers: Standoff, is the power source behind this shocking change in Captain America’s allegiance. This isn’t all that surprising. What’s twisted about this situation is what the Red Skull did in order to harness Kobik’s power.

In a trip to the department of backstory, we discover that the cosmic cube which would one day manifest as Kobik was once in the possession of the Red Skull, and he believes himself to be its rightful owner. He recounts an altercation years ago in which he tussled with Captain America over the cube, and it was shattered by a blow from the shield. The fragments are taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, separated and experimented on, and eventually, their unstable state leads to an explosion and the birth of Kobik, the person. We saw some of this in Standoff, but we learn more about how Maria Hill press-ganged Dr Selvig into working on the Kobik Initiative, and about how immediately after her creation, Kobik went into stasis, her conciousness somewhere else. Guess where it went? To hang out with someone she remembered loving her very much: the Red Skull.

Skull’s got some first world problems at the moment. Since fusing his brain with Charles Xavier’s, forcing people into blind obedience through terror and telepathy just doesn’t do it for him any more — not even making his chefs shoot themselves in the head for serving a bland celery soup entertains him. He wants to conquer the world by making people genuinely believe things, of their own volition — isn’t he a giver? Honestly, I find it hard to take him seriously because his tone reminds me of A Very Potter Musical’s Voldemort, a factor which is increased when Kobik comes calling. Once he figures out who she is, he’s overcome with joy to have his treasure returned to him, and immediately plans to let S.H.I.E.L.D. use her to bring about their own downfall.

The Red Skull manipulates Kobik into becoming an unwitting double agent by bonding with her, gaining her trust and letting her think that she was helping everyone along the way — that everyone’s all friends together, but that Hydra is just the bestest. It’s this indoctrination that leads Kobik to “fix” her beloved carer Selvig — when he starts to suspect something is wrong, she changes his very reality to make him an acolyte of the Red Skull — more than brainwashing, she truly alters his entire past, giving him new memories and loyalties — a life, as Skull discovers, within the Hydra of Kobik’s stories.

It turns out that the Pleasant Hill prison was the Red Skull’s doing all along, suggested to Maria Hill by Dr Selvig, as the first step in the Skull’s final solution for Steve — to have Kobik “fix” him in the same way. From here on out, the Skull commentates events from the Pleasant Hill arc from his perspective, filling in exactly what he orchestrated and where he intervened, Zemo’s coup, his own appearance as a disguised inmate, leading Steve precisely where he wanted him, into an altercation with Crossbones that left him near-dead. The Skull knew that Kobik would find Steve and want to help him, want to save him — he’d taught her to like Steve, from afar. “She will make him the most perfect version of himself,” Skull explains to Selvig. To Kobik, that means making him Hydra. So there you have it. When Steve was de-aged and restored to his former glory at the end of the Captain America anniversary edition, he also came back with a side serving of Hydra memories.

The Skull is ecstatic to have a Steve Rogers he can finally use — to have beaten him by “redeeming” him to the cause. He has big plans for Steve to lead his growing white supremacist army — “by your hand I shall inherit the Earth,” he tells him — well, not him, he’s kind of talking to himself, he’s nice and sane like that. That, or he’s leaving the world’s longest voicemail. But either way, that’s the grand plan — make Steve genuinely loyal to Hydra, ride him into battle like a noble steed, question mark, question mark, profit. I can see no way in which this carefully laid plan could possibly fail.

Kobik’s influence was one of my top predictions for what the eff was going on here — I mentioned it in my recap of CapSteve #1 — but I’m not patting myself on the back for it or anything. As logical explanations go, it was an easier guess than R+L=J, and that’s fine by me. The long arc of story was never going to be about figuring out how Steve became Hydra — it was always going to be about figuring out how to fix it. It’s going to be a long process — for starters, issue #2 does not reveal Steve’s secret to anyone else, including himself, so we’re still very much at square one. It’s also going to affect the wider Marvel universe, as Steve’s motivations may come into play in Civil War II We don’t know what Kobik — and therefore Steve — actually believes about Hydra, aside from loyalty to the Red Skull.

We also don’t know if her “fixing” only alters the inside of the mind, or if it changes actual history — re-writes past actions. If it’s just the former, nothing about the Steve Rogers you know and love is tarnished, but if it’s the latter, I might start to get worried. Either way, Kobik is not evil. She’s not a malicious tiny psychopath. She is a good-natured, generous, loving little girl who wants everyone to be happy. The Red Skull knows this, and would have had to use this angle to make her believe in Hydra. What ideals has she implanted in Steve? Somehow, I can’t quite believe they’d be the traditional Hydra values. Also, remember who her dad is right now, over in Thunderbolts. Will the Red Skull and Bucky get into a custody battle? (No, but like, can they though?)

The reveal in this week’s comic softens the blow, a little. I’m not going to say “I told you so, calm down, see” to those who went off the deep end about this. The people who were upset about this are still going to be upset about it today — I don’t think anyone actually believed that it wasn’t going to be undone (not that it’s quite been undone yet) and if any other readers did believe that the protests came purely from utter naivity about how comics work, then they’re the naive ones. The detractors of this story were furious that it had been done in the first place, regardless of outcome, and they stated that from the word go. I will turn a slightly judgmental eye to the voices claiming that Marvel changed the story in issue #2 due to the backlash from issue #1, that they backpedaled their Hydra Steve plan, as if they genuinely had originally planned for it to be a legit betrayal. As nice as it would be to think that the Powers That Be cared that much about public opinion (#givecaptainamericaaboyfriend), that’s not how publishing works. Similarly to a TV series, any feedback they chose to take on board to guide their storytelling would take months, if not years to implement, and the story in CapSteve #2 was written and signed off on before CapSteve #1 dropped. So no, guys. This was always the deal.

This whole Nazi Cap thing also left a bad taste in people’s mouths — to put it lightly — due to the creators, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, being Jewish. That this was an offence to their memory, that they’re rolling in their graves. I’m not going to cite the whole “Hydra aren’t Nazis” perspective that a lot of the comics industry seem to have flocked to as a defense of Spencer’s story — I understand perfectly why the majority of people associate Hydra and Nazism, and splitting hairs over the origin of something now so deeply linked in the public perspective to Nazism really isn’t the angle I’d take. The swastika is used in Hinduism as a lucky charm and a symbol of God; that doesn’t mean we ever feel comfortable seeing it in the Western world. A much better defense of this arc, one that not many people brought up, was that Kirby, along with fellow Jewish creator Stan Lee, actually wrote their own Steve-Is-A-Nazi brainwashed-by-the-Red-Skull arc – that they may be Jewish WWII veterans, but they’re also storytellers, and this subject matter was not off-limits to them. I don’t hold anyone’s personal upset about this arc against them, but it would be super awesome if people could stop using Jack Kirby’s name as a weapon with which to bludgeon others when he probably would have been just fine with this Steve story.

Nick Spencer’s insistence that the Steve in issue #1 was the real deal — no mind control, no clones — disheartened a lot of fans, who now claim, due to this reveal today, that the writer lied. Spencer stated on Twitter today that while he would absolutely lie to keep a story’s secrets, he didn’t here, and I actually agree. What Kobik did to Steve goes beyond brainwashing — the fabric of his own reality has been changed. Right now, this is the truth about Steve Rogers. The problem is, how are we going to get Steve’s real truth back? Who will be the first to find out what’s going on? DIBS ON BUCKY.

Next time, it’s Hydra vs. Hydra! The Red Skull will face off against Zemo, with Captain America caught in the crossfire, and the trial of Maria Hill begins.

Captain America: Steve Rogers #3 will be released on Wednesday, July 27.