Much like Civil War, the Secret Invasion tie-ins proved a nice place to get artists in who wouldn’t be able to do the monthly gig. Thus, Jim Cheung is back for this one. He’s teamed with John Dell and Justin Ponsor, so it’s gonna be a good looking book. But what’s it about? Well, page one of this issue is actually the last page of New Avengers: Illuminati 1.
Starting to feel like I shoulda covered that book. Too late! Dorrek refers to how his guys captured and experimented on the Illuminati when they showed up to try to wreck the empire.
While Dorrek goes back to the 60s, Princess Veranke, as you might assume, is new here.
Well, after she’s dragged off, we see that Dorrek’s assigned his science guy to work with the genetic material they got from the Illuminati to get up to no good. And his work is moved off Skrullos to make it more secret. Then we see Veranke exiled to the planet from SI #1, chanting “he loves me” to herself, and then we get this:
The FF uniforms date this as somewhere in the mid-80s to mid-90s, but how would the Skrulls know about the Night Nurse? Well, anyway, then we see a 2-page splash of Galactus, wherein he’s not destroying the Throneworld, but he’s meant to be. Then the Skrulls going to get Veranke from the beginning of SI #1, confirming that was her in the opening scene.
Veranke is shown to the science people, where she’s told all the years they’ve been mucking with the Illuminati’s DNA means they now know more about human, mutant and Inhuman biology than they themselves which, you know, good job, Illuminati.
And we saw that guy in Illuminati #5.
Gasp! They hinted at it pretty hard when Spider-Woman could bust the Mighty Avengers loose in MI 11. There’s also the matter of Spider-Woman being able to fly now, instead of just gliding. She attributed that to the process Hydra used to restore her powers (In NA 14), but she was lying! Throughout this era of Avengers, she’s been a triple-agent and she’s sown discord among both Avengers teams… and it was a Skrull plot the entire time. And Bendis knew this, and was writing toward it, before New Avengers started, and he didn’t even tell people. It’s been 3 years! Really playing the long game.