Original Sin #4 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

This issue is an elaborate ballet of super spies dancing in the shadows, but it all leads us to the same place as we were at the start, with Nick Fury in charge.

Bucky (of course) didn't kill Nick Fury; he killed a LMD version of him, as anyone who's read a Marvel comic in the last 15 years knew from the start.  He took the head to track the signal to the source, because he realized that he was being played.  The Black Panther and Dr. Strange have similar (and simultaneous) epiphanies and similarly trace signals -- magical and technological -- to the hidden space station where we discover that the real -- and older -- Nick Fury is.

The revelation that the real Nick Fury has aged is likely to be the most lasting development coming from this event.  However, other than the interesting existential question of whether LMD Nick Fury was acting independently of real Nick Fury, it doesn't really leave us anywhere all that different.  Cap and the Avengers will be able to continue their investigation without the LMD Nick Fury, and the three teams have gathered the information that they were sent to find.  The only real question is whether the real Nick Fury is the murderer; based on his appearance in the last issue, he's at least the guy in control of the irradiated bullets that someone (possibly him) has been using to be killing monsters, planets, and people.  Of course, if he were the killer, it seems unlikely that he would've sent the teams to gather this information in the first place.

I'm not sure what this revelation means in terms of the second half of this series.  If Fury is the murderer and can justify the killing, the three teams don't really have an action to complete; they'll just know that he's the murderer.  We may get an explanation of why he sent them on their missions, but that seems pretty secondary at this point.  Moreover, even if Cap discovers the real Nick Fury is the murderer, he, too, would likely just hear Fury's justification.  I mean, are they really going to arrest the real Nick Fury for killing the Watcher or some sort of inter-dimension monster?  For those reasons, I'm assuming that Nick isn't the murderer and we'll move into the next stage of the mystery next issue.  Otherwise, I guess Deodata is just going to draw three issues of everyone watching cat videos.  (That would be totally awesome, actually.)

Finally, I have a few small bones to pick with the creative team.  First, Aaron never really tells us how the Black Panther, Bucky, and Dr. Strange realize that they're being played.  They just all magically realize it at one point.  One of the worst pitfalls of these sorts of super-spy stories is that the author goes the route of just making everyone able to see through secrets, despite the fact that we, the reader, haven't seen any evidence that would lead them to these conclusions.  Sherlock Holmes might've made some great leaps, but Arthur Conan Doyle eventually described how he got from Point A to Point B.  Here, we're just supposed to take on faith that the three of them got to Point B for totally believable reasons based on something that they observed, even if we're not privy to the observation.  It's very tell not show.  Second, Aaron has Logan say that he thought that Bucky was dead, but he knew that Bucky was alive; both Hawkeye and Wolverine learned that he's alive in "Winter Soldier" #10.  Bad editor!  Bad!

** (two of five stars)