Hail Hydra #4 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Man, Remender ends his time on "Captain America" grimly.

The good news -- as long as it lasts -- is that Ellie has managed to gain control over the symbiote that possessed her last issue.  As a result, she's able to save Ian after he decided to leap to his death to prevent Leopold from getting access to the healing technology in his suit.  Reunited, they flee the HYDRA Avengers (composed of villains from Remender's run, including Dr. Mindbubble and the Iron Nail).  Along the way, Ian tries to convince Ellie to flee to Earth-616 with him, but Ellie resists surrendering.  This discussion happens against the backdrop of a flashback, where we see Ian having a similar conversation with Steve.  Ian asserts that Steve's approach to fighting evil -- of imprisoning, rather than executing, villains -- is just a series of lateral moves that failed to accomplish anything.  It's not exactly a warm father/son moment.

At some point, Ellie and Ian get trapped in a mindbubble, and this experience allows Ian to come to realize that Steve's way prevented Earth-616 from falling to HYDRA, as this Earth had done.  But, it doesn't solve his existential crisis, highlighted in his original conversation with Steve and the mindbubble one:  even if Steve's methods are suited to Earth-616, maybe Ian's methods means that he belongs in Dimension Z.  Ian and Ellie escape the mindbubble and they manage to get to the Infinity Elevator.  Ian hits the button for Earth-616, but one of Iron Strucker's shots fatally wounds Ellie.  Ian laments that they failed, though Ellie says that they succeeded because they tried.  An enormous explosion ensues, one that Strucker insists his blast couldn't have caused.  The Avengers search through the wreckage, but don't find anything, with Leopold declaring that they were "gone, as if they never existed."  Then, the final panel simply reads "Futility."

Seriously, it's dark.  It's unclear if Ian survived, and I'll be really sad if he didn't.  I think he's really the legacy of Remender's time on "Captain America," analogous to Brubaker's Bucky.  I'd be devastated to see him go.  But, I'm pretty sure that we haven't seen him yet in "Captain America:  Sam Wilson" or elsewhere in the new Marvel Universe.  He clearly hit the "616" button in the Infinity Elevator, and Remender implies that this action represents him making the choice that he belonged there.  But, it's unclear what Remender meant by ending the issue with the word, "futility."  Does it mean that Ian's efforts are futile, like he alleged that his father's were?  I hope that it doesn't, but I'm hard pressed to see what else they could be.

Putting aside Ian's fate, Remender does complete his journey to becoming a hero here (or at least seems to do so).  In "All-New Captain America," Sam struggled with Ian's willingness to kill (as he seemed to have done to Batroc), and Remender implies that the new Ian will have learned the value of taking the high road after his time on this HYDRA Earth.  I guess that we have to wait to see if he survived that lesson.

*** (three of five stars)

Hail Hydra #3 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

This series continues to be one of the most solid of the "Secret Wars" tie-ins.  It helps that Remender is telling a narrowly constructed story.  Rather than trying to update the setting of a previous event, as many of the other authors are struggling to do, we know as little about this world as Ian does.  As such, we have the same goal as him:  defeat Zola, regardless of the details.

Ian puts that plan into action here, taking Ellie with him to see Zola, since he knows that Zola's too arrogant to see them as threats.  He's right, and, as usual, this arrogance costs Zola:  Ian is able to use Iron Man's device to lock Zola in Steve' body.  (Ian also knew that Zola wouldn't be able to resist possessing Steve's body.)  But, before Ian can kill Zola, Ellie succumbs to the symbiote disease and Captain Hydra and his men arrive to take down Ian.

I'm still not 100 percent sure if Ian is going to win this one, making it all the more exciting.  But, the best part of this series is bound to be the conversation between Ellie and Ian, where they talk about their shared struggle to live with the heroic legacies of their parents.  It's nice for Ian to get to express these feelings for the first time, even if it's to a sister that he never meets and loses quickly.  For Ian, it's as close to family as he gets.

*** (three of five stars)

Hail Hydra #2 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Remender really covers an amazing amount of ground here.  He also really embraces the idea that anything can, and does, happen in "Secret Wars."

Before I get to the details, I just want to highlight that Remender does an amazing job of keeping Ian's voice in Leopold, his doppelgänger.  Extreme haughtiness is exactly what you'd expect from an evil version of Ian, and Leopold has it in spades.  It's a great example of how well Remender has fleshed out Ian in the few issues that he's appeared, since you can even recognize alternate versions of him.  Separately, I also thought that his commitment to returning to his parents was a great reminder of the love that he has for them.  In fact, Leopold is essentially the logical extreme of Ian if he never had this love, so this softer side of Ian, one that we rarely see, reminds us why he is who he is.  Now, onto the show!

After Leopold hands him his ass, Ian escapes into the sewers where he stumbles upon the Avengers' secret base.  The team is understandably skeptical of his story, since he looks just like "Captain Hydra" (Leopold).  However, Ian knows too much about Steve for him to be Leopold, and Steve decides to trust him.  He explains that he was the original Captain Hydra, but Zola proved too evil, so he escaped with a entire cache of munitions.  (I'll admit that I didn't fully follow Steve's story about the Revolutionary War.  If we're talking about the one that happened in 1776, it seems like Hydra was the one that revolted against the British, but the revolution turned dark, possibly under Zola's leadership.  Steve explains it all so quickly that I didn't really grasp it.  Suffice it to say, Steve left the revolution.)  We learn that the Avengers' main problem in defeating Zola is that he jumps from body to body.  Steve sees an opening with Ian's arrival:  they can use the munitions to create a distraction while Ian impersonates Leopold and gets close enough to Zola to use a device that Tony created to keep him in his body.

However, before Steve can finish sketching out this plan, Venom and the Vipers attack, since they followed Ian to the base.  Here, Boschi really lets loose.  Venom gruesomely kills the Avengers, putting his hand through Tony's chest and ripping the Wasp in half.  Later, after they're all dead, he begins devouring them.  Ian manages to escape with Steve and Sharon's daughter Ellie, but Venom lets Steve (the sole survivor) know that they've infected Ellie with a symbiote and she, too, will soon become a Viper.  He also seems prepared to turn Steve into a Venom as the issue ends.

The use of the symbiotes as a Zola-inspired device is really a brilliant twist, given their similarity to Zola's own mutates.  Given how quickly they decimate the Avengers here, it's hard to see how Ian could possibly win, particularly if he loses Ellie as a companion.  But, Remender reminds us several times here that he's the son of Steve Rogers and Sharon Carter, so he should really be fine with the one-man-against-all-odds fight.  Make Dad and Mom proud, Ian!

*** (three of five stars)

Hail Hydra #1 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Ho boy, Ian is in t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

Of all the premises of the "Secret Wars" tie-in issues, this one is perhaps the most interesting.  Ian is on Battleworld not because he made the transition like everyone else, but because he jumped into Hydra's Infinite Elevator to escape death when Zemo's island exploded.  It seems like he was briefly outside time when the "change" happened, meaning that he's from the Marvel Universe, just like the folks on Reed's life raft.  As such, he's understandably disoriented.  He encounters a kid spraying paint on a wall and asks for help, discovering in the process that Hydra rules this New York with an iron fist.  Startled, he has to pull himself together quickly when Hydra attacks.  He manages to escape, only to go into the belly of the beast to save the kid.  But, it's a futile effort:  he saves the kid and other folks designated for "sanitation," but this reality's version of Ian, Leopold, kills the kid.

Remender does a great job of keeping the focus of this issue on Ian and his emotional journey.  Although I've been impressed with virtually all the "Secret Wars" tie-in series, the weaker ones are the ones that focus too much on the changes in the status quo and not enough on using those changes as a prism through which the reader can see the character(s) in a new light.  Remender uses "Secret Wars" exactly that way here, as Ian is confronted with the version of himself that he would've been had he chose another path (Zola's, not Steve's).  None of the other tie-in series that I'm readying has gone with this approach so completely, even though it's a fascinating one.  (It's mostly because of the rule that you can't cross into other domains, so no one seems to have confronted an alternate version of themselves.)  Moreover, this premise gives us the opportunity to spend some quality time with the adult Ian, something that we haven't really had yet.  So, color me a happy camper.

*** (three of five stars)