>After the events of "Civil War 2," the Marvel Universe's biggest and brightest superheroes are reeling at best. Things are about to get a lot worse.
>Bruce Banner (Incredible Hulk) and James Rhodes (War Machine) are lost and the incomparable Tony Stark is in some kind of coma, passing off the mantle of Iron Man to Riri Williams. All while superheroes like Captain Marvel will have to deal with the repercussions of their actions in the series, which rolled out late last year.
>It's kind of a mess and that's where Captain America steps in. Everything changed last May for the formerly squeaky clean icon when it was revealed he was actually a Hydra agent, the nefarious underworld organization he had been fighting against for the last 70 years.
>With this Earth-shattering news still fresh in the beleaguered minds of die-hard Cap fans, the question is where do they go from here? Enter Marvel's new series "Secret Empire," where everything is about to change, not just for Captain America, but for absolutely every hero in the Marvel Universe.
>ABC News exclusively spoke with Marvel's Senior Vice President Tom Brevoort and Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso about the recent past, the present and the future of Marvel Comics.
>Hydra?!
>After Steve Rogers had his super soldier serum neutralized a few years back, he could no longer be Captain America. Sam Wilson, the Falcon and Steve's best friend, stepped in until a character named Kobik, a living cosmic cube, used its powers to bring him back, with one unknown caveat.
>"Unbeknownst to anybody but the readers, when Kobik did this thing to Cap, she had been influenced by the Red Skull [his archenemy dating back to WWII]," Brevoort explained to ABC News. "She didn't just restore Steve, but changed his history, so that he had been a Hydra operative and true believer going back to his earliest days as a young man in the 1920's and 1930's."