Captain America reveals his true allegiance in ‘Captain America: Steve Rogers’

Well, hot damn. I know Marvel likes to shock its readers with unexpected twists, but when I read the first issue of “Captain America: Steve Rogers” I thought there had been a misprint.

It turns out Captain America is, and has been for a while, an undercover agent of Hydra. As the comic progress, we continuously flash back to Steve’s childhood, where it is revealed he and his mother attended a Hydra meeting when he was a youth. 

In the present, newly regenerated after losing his soldier serum, Steve and his buddy Jack Flag are on a mission to capture Baron Zemo. As they close in on their target however, Cap turns on his ally by throwing him out of a jet!

The comic ends with:

My guess is that Steve has been a sleeper agent since childhood, and his programming is only beginning to kick in now. But how would Hydra know that Steve would grow to be the heroic soldier Captain America, or was it just sheer luck? To find out the truth of who Steve Rogers truly aligns with, I guess we’ll just have to keep reading the series! And for more info on exactly how and why the decision to make Cap a villain was made, TIME has an interview up with Marvel editor Tom Breevort on the subject.