This one’s the cover of Avengers 89, the first issue of the Kree/Skrull War. For all that it’s this famous event storyline, it was a pretty meandering walk. It wasn’t something like Secret War, it was a bunch of barely related adventures that eventually culminated in a big ol’ battle. It’s Khoi Pham, Danny Miki with Allen Martinez and Dean White with Paul Mounts, and you know what that means: It’s weird face time! Also it’s Noh-Varr time.
SO weird. Much of what he describes there is the Marvel Boy miniseries, before the prison part. As with Sentry and the Hood, Bendis is hellbent on hammering this square peg into a round hole. Noh-Varr spends a page wondering what to do, and making reference to the issue of that Illuminati miniseries where they visited him in prison, which was extremely weird. Then an alien virus causes a prison riot, somehow, and Noh-Varr declares “time to go.” Meanwhile, Skrull Mar-Vhell is bustin’ outta Thunderbolts Mountain, having a total freak about who he really is before crashing to the ground, where 2 Super-Skrulls attack him.
“No one but the Queen… and, uh, us, the guys chasing you, also.”
Skrull-Vhell spends a couple pages whuppin those guys, and we pause for an interview page celebrating Sal Buscema’s 40 years at Marvel! Nice. These guys are so rarely celebrated BEFORE they die. When the legends go, there’s always a page memorializing them, but how nice to do it for Sal while he’s still around. At the time, he was inking the ever-struggling Spider-Girl comic, written by Tom DeFalco and drawn by Ron Frenz. Sal inking a guy who made a career of ripping off him and his brother is kind of wild, but he is very generous about it. It’s nice! Well, anyway.
We jump ahead to Skrull-Vhell destroying Skrull ships in space, as we saw in the main title, but this time, we see a Skrull grab him by the face and really zap him, ending his rampage.
For an obvious retcon of a bad idea (Bringing Mar-Vhell back), this was a surprisingly good bit. Bendis was so gung ho about making Nor-Varr Captain Marvel, and yet it doesn’t happen. I don’t know why. And a good thing, too, so Carol Danvers can become Captain Marvel instead in a few years. Ok, let’s wrap this thing up next post. Well, the main series, anyway…