Otherwise known as Agent 13, Sharon Carter is one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s deadliest operatives.
But what's the full story behind this legendary ally of Captain America? From her family roots
to her most dangerous missions, this is the untold truth of Sharon Carter.
One thing worth knowing is that Sharon Carter wasn't actually the first Agent 13:
Her aunt Margaret "Peggy" Carter holds that distinction. During her time as Agent 13,
Peggy fights in the French resistance,
falls in love with Captain America, and takes on the first iteration of HYDRA.
Naturally, Peggy is heartbroken when Cap disappears. However, she quickly overcomes
her grief, joins a number of different spy agencies, and eventually becomes an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Her older brother Harrison later welcomes a daughter named Sharon,
and the two become very close - in fact, Sharon sees Peggy as something of a personal hero.
Having grown up dazzled by tales of her aunt's wartime exploits,
Sharon decides to join S.H.I.E.L.D. - and even adopts her aunt's old codename.
But then Peggy suddenly relapses into grief for Cap and is placed into an asylum. She
becomes so delusional, in fact, that she imagines Sharon to be her kid sister,
and Harrison to be her father. This strange plot line was introduced
mostly because of the increasing time lag between World War II and the modern era.
In the end, it turns out that Peggy is being manipulated by Doctor Faustus,
but Cap rescues her and she snaps out of her delirium. Cap finally convinces Peggy that they
can never be together… although he conveniently leaves out the part about him dating Sharon.
When Captain America first meets Sharon Carter, she looks so much like Peggy that
he actually thinks he's hallucinating. At the time, Sharon is on a mission for S.H.I.E.L.D.,
trying to prevent Batroc the Leaper from obtaining a chemical compound called Inferno
42. They later reunite while trying to take down A.I.M. and MODOK. Soon after,
she helps Cap and Black Panther bring down Baron Zemo after the notorious villain obtains a death
ray - and these are just a small handful of Agent 13's adventures in the Silver Age of Comics.
Sharon works frequently with Steve Rogers during this era, but Cap never
fully embraces her as a partner: Unfortunately, he's always too worried about her personal safety
to realize how lethal - and useful - she can be. It doesn't help that he's also kinda obsessed
with Bucky's death at this point, and can't stand the thought of losing another partner.
Both Captain America and Sharon Carter flirt with retirement on multiple occasions,
always in the hope that they might settle down together.
Cap is the first to consider this, when they're reunited for the first time - heck,
he even makes plans to propose to her. When he realizes he's about to be replaced by a
bunch of cosplayers, however, he realizes that he can't hang up the shield just yet.
Nonetheless, Cap tries to get Sharon to quit on multiple occasions. At first, she's resistant
to the idea, but she eventually agrees to take an inactive role with S.H.I.E.L.D. that places
her firmly on the sidelines. Later, Sharon regains her full-time role with S.H.I.E.L.D., as Nick Fury
claims her PhD in metaphysical psychology makes her too valuable an agent to lose. Sharon is
subsequently put in charge of an all-women cadre of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents called the Femme Force.
There is a brief time during which Sharon decides she's had enough of
S.H.I.E.L.D. and finally quits to be with Cap. Not long after, however,
Cap defeats the Secret Empire and learns that it's headed by a high-ranking government official. He's
so disillusioned by this revelation that he quits his role as Captain America, and when
Hawkeye talks Steve into becoming a new kind of hero, Sharon is less than enthused by the idea.
"You didn't see that coming?"
Ultimately, Cap's decision to walk the hero's path puts an end to his
dreams of living an idyllic life with Sharon.
Even by the standards of the Marvel Universe, Doctor Faustus is a truly vile villain. His
entire modus operandi is violating people's free will to make them his mind-slaves,
and the subtle nature of his powers make him especially difficult to root out and destroy.
He manipulates Peggy Carter for years, although he never learns anything of much use.
Then William Burnside, the twisted Captain America of the 1950s, comes under his control,
compelling him to become the leader of a neo-Nazi group called the National Force.
At this point, Cap and Sharon have been on-again, off-again for a long time.
She's still mad at him for choosing life as Captain America over her, and is busy flirting
with her neighbor, the pacifist Dave Cox. Sharon soon returns to active duty, and ends up acting
as a S.H.I.E.L.D. liaison for the New York police during their investigation of the National Force.
When she goes undercover, however, she quickly comes under the influence of Faustus,
who makes her one of his foot soldiers. During a battle against the National Force,
Cap loses sight of Sharon, who is later revealed to have self-immolated alongside a
number of other National Force agents. For all intents and purposes, Sharon Carter is dead.
Except, of course, she isn't.
"What a twist."
It's eventually revealed that Sharon has actually been sent on a deep cover mission
in Europe - but something went wrong along the way. She got completely cut
off from S.H.I.E.L.D. and ended up behind enemy lines, and it took her
years to make it out - with Captain America convinced that she was dead the whole time.
Now, at this point in comics canon, the super-soldier serum has begun to take a
toll on Cap's body. Just as he's about to die, Sharon and her team whisk away his body and give
him a total blood transfusion from the only other person with the serum running through their veins:
the Red Skull. As it turns out, the Red Skull - who has been inhabiting a clone of Cap's
body for years - arranged the rescue because he needs the real Cap to retrieve the Cosmic Cube.
The Cube is being held by a group of fanatics from A.I.M. called the Kubekult,
a group Sharon has successfully infiltrated. She puts the Cube in Cap's hands, knowing he'll
use its power for good, but Cap gets trapped inside it - with Adolf Hitler, of all people.
Of course, he soon triumphs, escapes, and defeats the Red Skull. Cap and Sharon are
reunited, and their on-again, off-again relationship is finally turned back on.
After the "Civil War'' conflict between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark turns deadly,
Captain America decides to end the bloodshed by turning himself in. On his way to his trial,
however, he's gunned down by a mysterious sniper. Shortly after the news of Cap's death goes public,
Sinthia "Sin" Schmidt, daughter of the Red Skull, corners a frantic Sharon in a hospital bathroom.
She then tells Sharon that Doctor Faustus has a message for her: "Remember."
Sharon realizes, to her horror, that she has killed Captain America. It turns out that this
whole mess has been part of an elaborate brainwashing scheme perpetrated by the Red
Skull and Doctor Faustus, who installed a subconscious trigger in Sharon's mind
and used her to seemingly kill Cap. Thankfully, it turns out that Cap was merely displaced in time,
After Captain America returns from his time-travel-pseudo-death, he and Sharon
become closer than ever. Subsequently, she joins his Secret Avengers black ops team,
and alongside a number of other heroes, they chase the Serpent Crown to Mars,
battle the Shadow Council, and uncover the Thule Society, a secret order of Nazis.
Then, when Peggy Carter finally dies of old age, Sharon, Cap, and their allies come
together to mourn her passing. At the funeral, however, a sniper starts shooting at them,
and they quickly learn that the assailant is the World War II hero Codename: Bravo.
Bravo was lost on an extradimensional mission, eventually returning and aligning himself with
a new version of HYDRA. Cap is subsequently trapped in the extradimensional Land of Nowhere,
but Sharon, alongside Fury and the Falcon, steps up to rescue him.
One of the weirdest Cap stories ever begins when a mysterious subway car
arrives at an abandoned station in New York. Cap climbs on board but Sharon doesn't,
as it only has room for one. Thus, Cap is whisked away to the brutal Dimension Z,
an alien reality that has been conquered by Cap's old enemy, Arnim Zola. Zola seeks
to remove the super-soldier serum from Cap, in order to give it to his children.
Cap spends the next dozen years trying to survive, even raising Zola's son Ian as his own.
He creates an alliance with a local tribe of monsters opposed to Zola and eventually
leads a rebellion against the villain. Sharon manages to track him down too,
as only 30 minutes have passed on Earth. Though Zola's daughter Jet Black switches
sides to join the heroes, Sharon is forced to sacrifice herself to save Cap and the Earth.
Predictably, however, Sharon isn't actually dead. Having arrived in Dimension Z, Sharon takes over
Cap's role and raises Ian as her own. When she is finally rescued from Dimension Z by the Falcon,
she and Steve reunite. For a while, they find peace and happiness together as they
coordinate the Avengers, but generally refrain from going on field missions.
Sharon has acted as director of S.H.I.E.L.D. on a couple of different occasions. The first of these
happens after she embarks on an expedition into the Savage Land with Captain America.
As their mission comes to an end, a tender moment between the two lovebirds is crashed by Nick Fury,
who later reveals that he's decided to appoint Sharon as his replacement.
Years later, when Cap is replaced by the Cosmic Cube-generated HYDRA Cap, it's revealed that the
Red Skull was behind S.H.I.E.L.D.'s initiative to use a partial Cosmic Cube to create the
super-villain town of Pleasant Hill. The Red Skull knew that the experiment was doomed to failure,
however, and even allowed Baron Zemo to come in and wreck it for good measure. This was former
S.H.I.E.L.D. director Maria Hill's project, and as such, she takes the fall for it. Evil Cap then
pushes to have Sharon take the role of director. Instead, Sharon recommends him for the job,
with a proviso that gives him absolute power in case of emergency. It, uh, doesn't end well.
"Hail Hydra"
The "Secret Empire" event sees Sharon step down as S.H.I.E.L.D. director because she thinks Steve
Rogers is the right man for the job. Unfortunately for her and everyone else, a young, sentient
Cosmic Cube named Kobik has been brainwashed by the Red Skull, rewriting reality such that Steve
Rogers has always been a deep-cover HYDRA agent. Steve secretly organizes an alien attack on New
York, creating a state of emergency during which he is awarded total control of all armed forces.
Evil Cap is still in love with Sharon, however, and gives her special treatment in his new regime.
He tries wining and dining her, then takes her out to a "HYDRA Youth" science fair where they
see kids work on surveillance equipment for hunting down Inhumans. When Evil Cap
survives an assassination attempt by Black Widow and starts to doubt himself, he turns
to Sharon for reassurance. Instead, she almost stabs him in the throat with a wooden stake.
Feeling a little peeved by this turn of events,
Cap puts Sharon in prison and has Doctor Faustus brainwash her. Unbeknownst to Faustus, however,
Sharon has studied his voice and techniques and is now immune to them. She poisons him,
knocks him out, and uses Cap's passwords to bring down his strike fleet - helping to
bring an end to HYDRA's reign and ushering in the return of the real Captain America.
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