It’s been a long road gettin’ here. 28 posts in this event. Not as long as the Civil War block, but close. Let’s see how it all shakes out. These covers have gotten weirder and weirder. Why these 3 guys? Laura Martin is back to coloring solo for the big finale. And Bendis goes to one of his favorite/my least-favorite moves for the last issue: It’s being told in flashback. Time and again, he robs the climax of his stories of their urgency by having people tell each other what happened after the fact. He’s been doing it since before he ever worked at Marvel, since his first longer comic series, AKA Goldfish. I don’t understand why he likes this so much. We’re out of the moment, the urgency is gone, these events already happened, it’s over. Two unidentified people talking over a 2-page splash of Janet glowing purple tell us how the battle was fierce and you almost have to admire the Skrulls’ preparedness, as one of them tells us they turned Jan into a biological weapon. The other asks what happened.
Janet dying like this sucks. It’s not a heroic death or even a very exciting one. She got really big, she started to glow, some narration told us she was killing everyone without bothering to explain, like, how, and then she died. People weren’t happy about this. Hard to blame them. It’s comic, tho, she’ll be fine.
Osborn kills Veranke. Her still being up and around after being shot in the face with an arrow and beaten for an entire issue by a Wolverine who somehow didn’t kill her is pretty absurd. But everyone in the world sees Norman Osborn kill the leader of the invasion, and that’s probably bad news. From there, the heroes went to space and blew up most of the Skrull armada, Tony saying he wants prisoners. We see Tony scanning the ships, then focusing in on one and taking control of it. It makes an awkward landing in New York, and then it opens up, and…
Everyone who got replaced is alive, how nice for them. There’s a joyous reunion between Iron Man, Hank Pym, and Thor, who was dead last time Hank was on Earth, but then he learns Janet is dead. And then Jarvis comes out of the ship, and Jessica Jones realizes the terrible mistake she’s made.
Oh man. That’s bad. Back at the ship, the SHIELD people are filing out, including Dum Dum and the Contessa, who don’t know Nick Fury is a fugitive. They try to talk to him and he and his Secret Warriors teleport away without a word. The narrators tell us they later learned the Skrulls kept all these people alive because they needed them to maintain the weird process that was used to impersonate them, which is as good an explanation as any, I guess. Killing them all would’ve been a wild, wild thing, but probably too much. And I bet the guy who got all that flak for Disassembled wasn’t eager to kill scores of characters at once, either. Then this happens:
Bobbi was killed in 1993. This makes no sense. My memory is it came out that bringing her back was basically something editor/writer Jim McCann really wanted, so they did it. And had the temerity to say the Bobbi who died in 1993 was a Skrull, even. Absurd. But, she’s back now, and ready to go star in a series of Hawkeye and Mockingbird minis by McCann. And then they inevitably break up and she just kinda floats around the Marvel U. And the next time she turns up on this blog, well, it’s gonna be surprising. Reed & Sue reunite, and then rush to the Baxter Building to find the kids, but they’re ok with Johnny & Ben, as seen in their own tie-in series. Then Reed ushers everyone out of the Baxter Building so it can begin repairing itself.
Who, indeed? Is all forgiven? Tony Stark gave up on caring about registration the second he saw the Spider-Skrull corpse, and everybody played nice during this event. But the war is over. What does that mean?
Icy. The Young Avengers (Minus Stature, who’s still with the Initiative) and Noh-Varr are helping round up Skrulls. Teddy, the half-Kree, half-Skrull Hulkling, says he doesn’t understand this, that the Skrulls have dozens of worlds and don’t need to take over the Earth. But one prisoner says that’s not true, and informs him they lost everything in the Annihilation Wave. Does this mean Teddy wil step up as the prophesied ruler of the Kree and Skrull empires? Not for another 10 years or so!
Iron Man is in for an incredibly rough ride after this, as Matt Fraction writes and Salvador LaRocca unfortunately draws one of the most insane Iron Man stories of all time. We saw some of their warm up, they did one arc before Secret Invasion, but it was post-SI that their book went wild. Sadly, not really under our purview anymore. But Tony’s out as top cop. If Civil War was a bumbling, childish, overly-simplified take on the freedom vs. security debate after 9/11, Secret Invasion kind of is 9/11. Except when Bush failed to keep America safe from a preventable attack, he somehow parlayed that into a 2nd term. Tony Stark actually gets held to account, because this is fiction. Speaking of which, that’s the only way Norman Osborn takes his place. This status quo is patently absurd. And I don’t know Bendis, we’re not friends, but I’ve interacted with him and heard & read enough interviews to know that he would say Donald Trump getting elected would prove this works, that the most despicable person in the world can trick people into making him a hero. But Donald Trump wasn’t previously most famous for murdering people, nor was he a convicted murderer who was only let out of jail to lead a bunch of other murderers in the stupidest superhero team of all time. This isn’t like Donald Trump at all, this is like America cheering the Zodiac Killer becoming the head of the CIA and the FBI at the same time. It’s just ludicrous. I mean he was still serving his sentence! He was on work release for this Thunderbolts nonsense. And the government says all’s forgiven because he shot someone who was already dying? The public supporting him, ok, whatever, but the government? Preposterous! And it’s the new normal. And so is this:
Meet The Cabal, the evil opposite number of the Illuminati (The villains having a slightly less evil-sounding name than the heroes did is very funny). A lot of turmoil about who’s in this room, let me tell you. Joe Quesada later said he wasn’t too excited about Secret Invasion, but it was the new status quo after it that got him excited about it. Who knows if that’s true, that guy was a Stan Lee-style salesman, but this status quo is about as bad as it gets in my opinion, so buckle up. We’re in for a stupid year. But we’re not quite done here yet, either.
Overall, I think this event holds up better than I thought. Stupid ending aside. I think I, and most people, maybe, were badly thrown off by the Avengers teams essentially being sidelined for almost the entire time. Which is a fair complaint, I think. In 2008, the Avengers comprise almost all of Marvel’s most popular non-mutant heroes AND Wolverine, taking them off the field for this seems foolish. But seeing it again after all these years, I realize it’s not an Avengers story, it’s a Marvel Universe story. The scope being so gigantic that Bendis can’t even check in with every subplot in each issue is admirably ambitious. And the vacuum caused by the Avengers being stuck in the Savage Land both makes sense as a Skrull tactic, and allows lesser characters like Agent Brand, the Initiative and Young Avengers to step, and gives the Secret Warriors a pretty explosive intro. Overall, I like it more than I did when it was coming out, I would say. If not for the idiotic ending… But, that’s all in the past, and it’s surely not the last bad idea on this blog. This blog’s MOSTLY bad ideas from here on out, so who really cares…