That Sense Something Is Just Out Of Place

There are times when I'm reading Secret Avengers and I think it must be taking place in some alternate Marvel Universe from the one I'm mostly familiar with. Hidden cities filled with artificial intelligences convinced the Avengers wiped out mutants and will do the same to them. "Red light nations" where Arcade is a bartender at a strip club, and people are absolutely terrified of Taskmaster.

Don't get me wrong, Taskmaster's no slouch, but he's lost enough fights that I wouldn't expect his reputation to be that highly regarded.

It's like everything is almost how I remember it, but just slightly off-center. Maybe because it's sort of an espionage book, everything is a little darker, a little more grim, a little uglier than I thought, so it feels like a universe where the heroes have fallen behind just a little too much. Like, you're trying to catch up on paperwork, yardwork, whatever, but you find once you get a certain distance behind you just can't seem to make up the ground, and thing snowball. Or, there was a study in Australia about whether foxes could be used to control the rampant rabbit populations and they found they could, up to a point. But once the rabbits' numbers reached a certain level, the foxes just didn't eat enough of them to bring the numbers back down.

That's kind of what it feels like. Which really ought to feel right, since pretty much every future we've seen for Marvel Earth is lousy, and it had to start going down hill sometime. But those were always possible futures, so they could theoretically be averted, and they were always, you know, in the future. They hadn't arrived yet. This one seems to have arrived.