Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Secret Invasion

Nick Fury’s gray morality took a swing to the darker side thanks to Secret Invasion’s revelations of his past, and the MCU effectively confirmed he broke a rule Marvel upheld for decades. Fury’s story has always been one marked by doing whatever it takes, but Secret Invasion’s ending left question marks over whether he is even good. And by Marvel's first set of regulations, the point is even more clear.

The Comics Code Authority once ruled over all comics content with an iron fist, establishing regulations most comics publishers adhered to. Some of the rules were understandable given the reader demographic, like avoiding profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity and nudity entirely. Others - like the use of the word “horror” in titles - seem overzealous even for the 1950s when the first rules were introduced. 70 years later, Nick Fury’s MCU Phase 5 arc would never have passed the regulations.

Related: Marvel's Secret Invasion Lied To Us All

How Nick Fury “Broke” CCA Rules

The first rules of the CCA regulations focus on the portrayal of crime. In the 1950s, moral panic about comic book content led to the industry adapting a version of the movie world’s self-censoring Hays Code, very much on a voluntary basis. But the regulations expressly forbade some do the moral ambiguity and outright criminal activity that Samuel L Jackson's MCU Nick Fury relied on to gain his exalted position.

Secret Invasion’s shocking Avengers retcons unveil the truth of Nick Fury’s backstory and his use of the Skrulls as extra-legal operatives taking out targets and identifying ways to strengthen Fury and SHIELD’s position in the absence of an effective Avengers Initiative in the wake of the events of Captain Marvel. Shockingly, Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) revealed in Secret Invasion’s final episode that his human form was modeled on the first person Fury sent him to kill, as a reminder of what he’d been forced to do. Fury, it turned out, was a commander of assassins and not just spies.

In that respect, there is no way Fury’s storyline would ever have passed the CCA’s strict code of regulations, which expressly ruled out criminal activity that was “justified” as a means to an end:

Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals.

Perhaps most shockingly, unless Secret Invasion season 2, or another future MCU project addresses Fury's crimes and holds him accountable in a way Secret Invasion failed to, the former SHIELD director will get away with it. The final moments of Secret Invasion episode 6 ostensibly give Fury his happy ending, sending him back to space to concentrate on his SABRE mission, with his Skrull wife Priscilla in tow, while G'iah and Earth's million Skrull refugees are once more abandoned on Earth, this time hunted down for their very existence. The further implication suggests that if SABRE succeeds as the suit of armor Iron Man wanted to see around the Earth, Fury's shady past crimes will be justified.

Nick Fury Proves How Far The MCU Has Come From Early Marvel Comics

Ultimately, Marvel Comics officially dropped the CCA in 2001 (by which point it had been revised and was already being ignored by publications for years). It remains intriguing to compare Fury’s MCU arc to what the CCA outlawed, particularly in terms of the portrayal of authorities and justice:

Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.

The MCU’s Fury is the ultimate defiance of respected authority, almost by design. This is a character who happily embraced the assumption of his own death in The Winter Soldier to avoid scrutiny in his missions, whose ledger had vastly more red in it than Black Widow. Unlike Natasha and Bucky Barnes, Fury embraced criminality to get what he needed: he was never forced, other than by his own will to succeed at all costs. Unlike Captain America, he never fought authority by doing the right thing in the face of adversity: he succeeded precisely because of those crimes and was rewarded with an incredibly powerful position.

The MCU obviously is not the comic books it was once based on; even the named arcs like Secret Invasion often bare no resemblance to the original arcs, but part of that is because of the freedom to be more challenging. The version of Nick Fury revealed by Secret Invasion is a complex, challenging figure, and he did help save the world, but he did so by moving as far away as possible from the code of conduct comics once would have limited him by in quite stunning fashion.