The entire SHIELD organization changed completely in Marvel Comics 16 years ago, and it created a story that the MCU could never have considered telling. In Marvel Comics, as well as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, SHIELD was an organization that was set up to serve as a peacekeeping, anti-terrorism agency that worked for the United Nations to protect the world. From the start of Marvel Comics, Nick Fury was the head of this group and they worked as spies and aided military forces when it came to fighting groups like Hydra and AIM. However, everything we know about SHIELD changed 16 years ago.
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On April 7, 2010, Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver reimagined SHIELD and revealed that the organization had an even wilder beginning than anyone could have known. This story began in SHIELD (Vol. 1) #1, and it showed that everyone from Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei were members of the organization.
SHIELD Changed Completely Under Jonathan Hickman
In April 7, 2010, Jonathan Hickman began his new story about the origins of SHIELD, and it took him eight years to finally finish his tale. Part of the reason for the delay was that Hickman’s story was overly ambitious and introduced an organization called the Brotherhood of the Shield. This showed that SHIELD had been around for a very long time, and originated from an ancient secret society created to keep Earth safe over a millennia.
The original motto introduced here was “This is not how the world ends.” What makes it stand out is that it included some of the brightest minds throughout history, who all gathered in Immortal City and worked to ensure that they protected the Earth at all costs. This makes them almost more like the Illuminati in Marvel Comics that the modern-day version of SHIELD.
To understand how deep the members of this group became, it included Leonardo da Vinci, who actually travelled across space and time to retrieve a Celestial from the sun. Galileo Galilei was the man who preceded Leonardo da Vinci as the leader of the Brotherhood of the Shield, and he actually repelled Galactus years before the Fantastic Four ever faced him. Sir Isaac Newton took over as the leader after murdering Galileo, but Newton drove the Brotherhood to a dark place as he prepared for the “final fate” of humankind and its end.
This is where the storyline went, as Newton paid off all the Brotherhood of the Shield members to follow him by offering them the Elixir of Life, granting them immortality. This all changed when Leonard di Vinci returned via time travel and began to split the loyalty between him and Newton, and it all finally ended when Newton was sent to a world where Earth died, to satisfy his curiosity and end his threat to this world. This brought in everyone from Nostradamus and Nikola Tesla to Michelangelo and more.
However, it took Hickman a long time to finish Brotherhood of the Shield. The first volume of SHIELD ended after six issues in 2011, and it took 10 months for these six issues to get released. This saw Newton and da Vinci begin their rivalry, with two familiar faces in the middle: Howard Stark and Nathaniel Richards. Hickman picked things up with SHIELD Vol. 2, which ran for four issues and then stopped publication until 2018 when Hickman returned to finish his story with two more issues. The main reason for the delay was Hickman working on Secret Wars and the books that followed, and it took seven years to finally wrap up the story.
The MCU Never Could Have Told This SHIELD Story
There are so many reasons that the MCU could never dream of doing something like Brotherhood of the Shield. There are several movies that take real-life figures and put them into more modern stories, with Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige using Nikola Tesla as one example. However, the number of iconic historical figures, added to the idea of trying to implement it in Marvel is a little too far reaching for the movies.
The only characters who would be familiar at all would be Howard Stark, who was played in the MCU by both Dominic Cooper (young) and John Slattery (old), and Nathaniel Richards, who has never been in the MCU but has his name linked with Reed Richards. Other than that, it would be about characters like Leonard di Vinci, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Nostradamus, Michelangelo, Nikola Tesla, and more. While it would be a great way to see how SHIELD was formed, it is too late anyway. SHIELD is no longer important in any way in the MCU, and it is too late, although any adaptation of this Jonathan Hickman storyline would have been a tough sell to audiences.
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