Marvel TV Studios has found itself with a relatively decent TV show, Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.

But curiously they don't have a comic with a similar name. They have Secret Avengers, which features Agent Phil Coulson, Maria Hill, Nick Fury Jr and more, but it's not obvious.

They did have a book called S.H.I.E.L.D. by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver, of which four issues came out.

But that was all. At the time, Weaver blogged,

So then, Jonathan and I were off doing separate things. S.H.I.E.L.D. was officially on a hiatus. Then I had to have my gallbladder removed, which killed my productivity for about a month. Meanwhile Jonathan was keeping super busy. So busy that when I did finally wrap up my Uncanny X-Men issue there was still not a full script for S.H.I.E.L.D. #5. Jonathan had only found the time to write the outline for the issue, so we decided to do it in the "Marvel Method ."

Issue 5 was drawn in April though it remains unpublished. But there was no script or outline for issue 6. Well, Dustin Weaver blogs the timeline,

After completing my Avengers commitment I emailed Jonathan, and all the editors involved with both SHIELD and Avengers saying that all that I wanted to do was finish SHIELD and could we do that. I was told that everyone wanted to finish it and that we would, but that Jonathan was hard at work on Infinity and SHIELD just wouldn't be happening till after that. So, I agreed to work on Infinity with the idea that SHIELD would come after that. On October first, after completing my commitment to Infinity I sent this email to Jonathan and S.H.I.E.L.D. editor, Nick Lowe. Once again I was reassured that we would be finishing it, but once again, there was no script. Also, they needed help with finishing Infinity #6 on time, so I jumped on that. Then they needed some help finishing Inhumanity #1, so, begrudgingly, jumped on that. Then I did variant covers for Avengers 25,26,&27, which was my idea, but at this point I wasn't sure I wanted to do it. (That's a whole other story:) You guys will like this.) Then Marvel offered me a gig that would have been a substantial and important one, but I turned it down. Which wasn't easy to do. I also turned down a cover job. Then they offered me another arc of Avengers. At this point, I emailed Jonathan. I needed to know if I should take the Avengers job or if we could do SHIELD. And then, after some back and forth, on December twenty third, Jonathan responded to me with this email.

…and yeah. That's how I responded. And then Jonathan tweeted this image.

And the rest is history… until someone realised that Marvel's SHIELD book is about an ancient SHIELD and stars, not Agent Coulson, but Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo.