This cover references Strange Tales 135, when that title was shared by Dr. Strange and Nick Fury. The original cover had a Hydra guy up top instead of a Skrull. This one’s another new art team, featuring Stefano Caselli on lines and Daniele Rudoni on colors. Caselli will come out of Secret Invasion with a pretty cool gig, and I will come out of Secret Invasion expecting him to be a huge star. The fact that he didn’t baffles me to this day. Look at this:
Caselli’s art looks like stills from the coolest cartoon ever made to me. His stuff is crisp, detailed, appealing and consistent. Why was he not huge!? Well, anyway, the recriminations continue, as we see Yo Yo kidnapped and beaten by Hydra, who demand to know where Fury is, but she refuses to tell them, under threat of death, and that turns out to be a test Nick put all of them through. In the “present” (2 days ago), he says they’re all smarter, stronger more trustworthy and savvier than they were before, and bad things are happening, and they have to bring him Maria Hill. Thus, the next day, the team is in position. The president of Madripoor has come to the US and announced he’ll be meeting with Hill, so they know where she’ll be, and they have their tasks. Their kidnap operation begins with Phobos approaching Hill and her security looking like the child he is to get close enough to do his thing.
Yo Yo uses her super speed to snatch Hill, dumping her on the ground near a van, which Stonewall tosses her into. Hellfire is the getaway driver, and does his thing. The helicarrier and all sorts of SHIELD personnel are in pursuit of their regular ol’ van, but then it’s Druid’s turn.
Despite that “To be continued,” these guys don’t get another tie-in. I guess it was to be continued in the main event or whatever. When the smoke clears on Secret Invasion, a new series called Secret Warriors launches, written by Jonathan Hickman and illustrated by Stefano Caselli. The first issue claims to be cowritten by Bendis and Hickman, but Bendis was happy to tell anyone who’d listen he didn’t really do anything. He thought he was bigging up his friend and rising star Hickman, but what he was doing was exposing a dishonest business practice. In this period, a lot of established, “hot” writers found themselves “cowriting” books with up and comers, and then the established guy would disappear. And Bendis threw a pretty bad light on that by just going, “It’s all Hickman, I didn’t do anything!” He created the cast, obviously, and he took credit for the twist in the first issue, in which Nick Fury learns SHIELD has been secretly run by Hydra for its entire existence, but other than that, he said, it was all Hickman. Who absolutely ran with it, bringing his very graphic design-y approach to comics with him, filling the backpages with charts and lists enhancing the world he was building, something he continues to do to diminishing return for the rest of his career. After this event, he’ll also write an FF miniseries tying into the post-Secret Invasion status quo, and it will be LEAGUES better than the actual FF book, and also prove to be his trial run for taking it over, where he and a few different artists will do one of the all-time best FF runs, at least, according to me. Then he gets Avengers. And then things get… really, truly crazy. But that’s years away from this moment. Next post, we return to the main series.