I like this comic but at the same time I was kind of hoping that with the fall of Norman Osborn we could have just one Avengers team, with the heroes acting cohesively and strategically to deploy team members and keep the world safe.  But we are where we are.  And we kinda get part of that here.

After Osborn’s Dark Reign, the President assigns former Captain America, now Captain Steve Rogers, the responsibility of forming a new covert ops team.

Sort of like the Avengers version of X-Force, only without the license to kill.

In these early issues, Captain Steve Rogers leads a team of Beast, Moon Knight, Valkyrie, War Machine, Beast, Ant-Man, and his own girlfriend Agent 13.  They take stop Roxxon Corporation from getting its hands on a Serpent Crown variant.  It’s called the “Thorned Crown,” but for simplicity’s sake I’m tagging it as Serpent Crown.  There are actually a bunch of variants, all with unique names, that are being sought by Nick Fury’s “Shadow Council,” Roxxon, and The Secret Avengers.  

Oh, and also Nova.

In that picture, above, Moon Knight has a space suit.  That’s a thing now.  I do like this comic, but I really don’t like what happens to Moon Knight every time he joins an Avengers team.

Nova ignores the advice of his Worldmind consciousness and puts the crown on, which makes him an enemy and also gives us a space/cosmic angle for this team.  

This is an Ed Brubaker joint, so there’s lots of plot intricacy–beyond the scope of the overviews I provide on this site.  Big picture: That Nick Fury who was being a jerk to Sharon in the picture above is actually an LMD created by Jake Fury and he goes by the name Max.  Get it, Max Fury?  Like the MAX Fury comic (which is really good)?  Dunno if that was intentional.  Anyway, I say all that to explain why you don’t see Nick Fury in the characters tags below.  It’s not revealed in this story.

The crown is given a backstory through a flashback where a Confederate soldier named Aloysius Thorndrake creates a Shadow Countil to access Mars.

It’s not as clear as it could be from the narrative, but you can piece it together–especially when Thorndrake is revealed as the leader of the Shadow Council in the present day, as well.

Back to the Secret Avengers: To free Nova from the Crown’s corrupting influence, the Xandarian Worldmind temporarily moves the Nova Force out of Richard Rider and into Steve Rogers. 

This does the trick, and the good guys win.

When it’s all done Nova gets his hat back.

And then he flies off the play in space in the Thanos Imperative.

The threat of the Crown is subdued for now, and the Secret Avengers must address Max Fury next.