The series details the secret history of an occult organization called the Brotherhood of the Shield, with a history extending back to ancient Egypt.
The main story of the first issue is set in 1953 shortly after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, during the height of the Cold War. Shield agents Nathaniel Richards and Howard Stark enlist a young man named Leonid with unspecified superpowers into the organization, taking him to Shields's High Council in the Immortal City under Rome. The High Council reveals that they know "the final fate of Man", and their mission is to ensure nothing threatens the world before this occurs. They have chosen Leonid because he has a destiny. Flashbacks reveal that the Shield was founded by Imhotep following a battle (alongside Apocalypse and the original Moon Knight) against the Brood, and that previous agents include Zhang Heng (who tricked a Celestial into using the sun to give birth to its child instead of destroying the Earth or the Moon to do so), Galileo Galilei (who fought against Galactus) and Leonardo da Vinci (who is shown with a mysterious device, flying off in an ornithopter).
Tropes
- Ancient Conspiracy: The brotherhood of the Shield
- Arc Words / Badass Creed: "This is not how the world ends".
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: This is pretty much the entire point of the 2010 series. Major characters include Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Galileo, and Michelangelo as a god-like being.
- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Fending off Galactus seems to require a massive human sacrifice. Although it should be noted that said sacrifices all basically knew the risks.
- Call-Forward: It's not explicitly pointed out or obvious, but when Nathaniel Richards, Howard Stark and the Night Machine get sent forward in time, Richards keeps gazing at a statue in the distance. It's a statue of Immortus, who would later bring several alternate versions of himself together and force them to kill each other.
- Also, the Celestials' plan involves the baby Celestial incubating inside the Earth.
- In a panel where Imhotep faces the brood there is a particularly familiar warrior in the background, looking closely it is Apocalypse.
- Also, the Celestials' plan involves the baby Celestial incubating inside the Earth.
- Chromosome Casting: Almost the entire cast of the comic is men, the only significant female character being Mina, and even she is revealed to be an uplifted bird. No particular justification for this given.
- Clock Punk: Leonardo's space suit, the machine used against Galactus
- Cyborg: Nikola Tesla
- Deus ex Machina: Leonid, after his ascension, tidies everything in the plot up as he's too powerful for either the protagonists or antagonists to meaningfully oppose.
- The Everyman and Audience Surrogate: Leonid
- First-Contact Math: The Star Child early on seems to communicate in only mathematical equations.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: Implied with Newton
- Half-Human Hybrid: Leonid is half human half Deviant.
- Human Sacrifice: Apparently the cost of trying to make a new Earth, as might be needed if the world were to end.
- Let Us Never Speak of This Again: To appease the Vatican, the early appearance and defeat of Galactus is covered up by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, thus erasing the events from 10 days from "ever happening".
- Mind Screw: The symbology of the series gets really crazy at times... and that's before you find out that Tesla, Newton, Da Vinci and Michelangelo are main characters.
- The Omniscient: The Forever Man aka Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, who also plays The Chessmaster setting up a number of events in the 2011 series.
- Parental Substitute: Nikola Tesla and Mina are the adoptive parents of Leonid.
- Retcon: Jonathan Hickman made several additions to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s history through this series and his concurrent run on Secret Warriors. The first, from Secret Warriors, was that S.H.I.E.L.D. has always been a secret division of the HYDRA organization (or possibly vice versa, or maybe both) and the premise of the 2010 series was that S.H.I.E.L.D. or an organization which will one day become it has been around since ancient Egypt and had various of history's greatest minds as members.
- To tie these two retcons together a HYDRA agent in Secret Warriors refers to the organization as "the Spear", and SHIELD has the Brotherhood of the East represented by a spear, just as the Brotherhood of the West is represented by a shield. The present day incarnations of both organisations were formed as splinters of Leonardo's Great Wheel cabal in the sixties, as were Scorpio's Zodiac Cartel and Leviathan.
- There's also Howard Stark (father of Tony Stark) and Nathaniel Richards (father of Reed Richards) as agents of the Brotherhood of the Shield.
- Major Marvel Universe threats show up long before they canonically ever noticed Earth, such as Ancient Egypt being attacked by the Brood, a Celestial in China, and friggin' Galactus showing up in Renaissance Italy. That last one is the most egregious retcon, as surely Galactus would remember getting his ass kicked by humans, yet in his next chronological appearance he makes no mention of ever having visited Earth, and is shocked when humans defeat him.
- Science Hero: Leonardo da Vinci.
- Walking Spoiler: Most of the historical figures in the book if you try to describe them.
