Might wanna wipe yer chin there, buddy. They were giving away masks of this cover, like the kind you used to cut out of the back of a cereal box. Well, it’s time to check back in with Thunderbolts Mountains, which we’ve not seen in awhile. I’m sure there was a reason they lived in a mountain, but it seems very silly. This picks up directly where this subplot left off however many issues ago it was. Was that in issue one? I’m losing my place.
Warren Ellis’s deal, by and large, was knowing how to write a bastard. Most if not all of his heroes were mean, morally-gray-or-worse guys who happened to want to do the right thing. Then he turned out to be a bastard himself, which I suppose shouldn’t have been such a surprise. At any rate, Norman Osborn as penned by Warren was a scary and dangerous master manipulator, a totally different animal even than the character he’d been in ASM since coming back. And Bendis clearly wanted a piece of that real bad. But it’s not really in his wheelhouse. Osborn has become a Warren Ellis bastard, and there’s really only one guy who could do that. Well, anyway, we’re off to Nick Fury’s secret base, where Stature, the Young Avenger who joined the initiative, is waking up with her former teammates. Including Vision, whose head seemed to blow up last issue? I don’t know. And why did they only take her? Did they leave all the other heroes to die? This hardly seems like the time to worry about registration. But their reunion is cut short by this:
Marvel being all about Stephen Colbert in this moment is not something I remembered. I assume this is before he had Joe Quesada on his show. Pretty sure. This “he loves you” bit was ok (at least) as a weird mystery til now, but the Skrulls saying that to an Earth population they’re trying to coerce without explaining what it means doesn’t make any sense. Up in orbit, Agent Brand is shooting her way through her Skrull ship when she finally finds Reed Richards, all stretched out and being tortured. She blows some airlocks.
A nice emotional reaction from Reed. Too many writers try to make him a robot, but Bendis is better than that. Back aboard the helicarrier, Maria Hill keeps defying Jarviskrull, so they shoot her, revealing she’s taken Nick’s advice and started using LMDs. We find her up a tower on the helicarrier with a sniper rifle. She hits Jarviskrull just for good luck before self-destructing the entire thing, flying away on a jetpack. Back in the Savage Land, various heroes and Skrull heroes have converged on Tony Stark’s location, including Spider-Man, Ka-Zar & Shanna, and are arguing about who’s real or not.
Ok, but now you gotta ask yourself… how could Mockingskrull possibly have known the thing Clint asked her for?
Hawkeye: Out for blood! Will they kill every last one of them? Probably not!