Hail Hydra #1 (Marvel)
From September 2015
writer: Rick Remender
artist: Roland Boschi
Yeah, I had no idea this one even existed, or at least what it was, among the glut of Secret Wars spin-off mini-series. Someone over at Marvel had a look at what DC was doing with Convergence, and decided they'd like some of that action, and so a lot of old storylines were revisited in one form or another, and apparently one of them was Rick Remender's run on Captain America, by Rick Remender himself, and that Secret Wars spin-off mini-series is this very title. Again, I had absolutely no idea. The title doesn't exactly give it away, now does it?
There were apparently four issues of this, all of them written by Remender. It's a follow-up, specifically, to his notion that Arnim Zola had a son who in Damian Wayne fashion ended up being mentored by Steve Rogers. While the greater story around Hail Hydra draws on the bonkers kit-bashing reality of Secret Wars and thusly dumps Leopold Zola/Ian Rogers into an alternate reality where Arnim Zola rules with an iron fist, it at least puts him into a situation where he must confront his past all over again.
Remender's Captain America was easily one of my most pleasant discoveries of the past few years, something that broke free of the pseudo-earnestness of the Ed Brubaker years and just had some fun with the core concepts. I love that Marvel gave him a shot to revisit it. I don't know if it was Marvel's or Remender's idea to completely bury the result, but it at least becomes another pleasant discovery, because this is once again one of the best things I've read from Marvel recently.
I also love that Roland Boschi, whether at Remender's direction or otherwise, ends up depicting the alternate Leopold Zola Ian finds himself confronting exactly like Tom Hardy's Shinzon from Star Trek Nemesis. It can't have been a coincidence one way or another.
From the sales of Convergence I don't think Marvel was all that interested in that action.
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