NICK FURY

For decades the story seemed settled, and ugly: Jacob “Jake” Fury, introduced in Strange Tales Vol. 1 #159 (1967), had grown up resenting his older brother Nick, resurfaced as the masked Scorpio in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Vol. 1 #1 (1968), and helped found the Zodiac crime cartel. When The Avengers Vol. 1 #72 (1970) unmasked him, Marvel's top spy officially had a supervillain for a little brother.

That Scorpio eventually died by his own hand in front of the Defenders, and the file stayed closed for more than thirty years. Then Secret Warriors Vol. 1 #25–26 (2011) reopened it with a Fury-family secret: on a Great Wheel mission for Leonardo da Vinci, the brothers had found the prototype device that would inspire S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Life Model Decoys, and it had scanned Jake and built a duplicate of him. The duplicate was the Scorpio who turned criminal and died. The man himself never did.

The real Jake Fury spent those decades as his brother's deepest cover agent. He killed the ailing original Kraken, took the dead man's voice-changing armour and private notes, and sat on Hydra's High Council wearing the Kraken's face while feeding its secrets toward Nick. The worst villain in the Fury family tree was a malfunctioning copy, and the brother Nick supposedly lost to crime was dismantling Hydra from its own boardroom.