The dramatic return of Nick Fury in humanity’s darkest hour is a pretty, pretty good beat, I must say. Emily Warren pitches in to help Laura Martin on colors this month. Presumably because coloring a comic with 40 zillion characters in it takes a lot longer than usual. I mean, imagine being the art team for a story like this. They’re so lucky that Leinil Yu is shockingly fast for such a detailed artist. This man drew an 8-issue story about a worldwide alien invasion and it shipped on time. And speaking of the scope of this book, it’s time to look in on some of the stuff we really haven’t seen since #1:
Carol drops down into the middle of Nick Fury’s new team fighting the Skrulls, surprised to see Nick, as the narration says they’re going to lose because they don’t know who to fight in this conflict. And then Nick shoots Carol, so certain she’s a Skrull she doesn’t even have time to prove otherwise.
Before Black Widow can shoot one or both of them, Skrull Phoenix and Beast find her, and she has to shoot them. By the time she’s able to turn her attention back, Veranke is gone. Whatever she was doing to try to poison or brainwash or whatever Tony is still active, and Natasha has somehow not fallen for the bit, so she hits him with a shot of adrenaline.
Meanwhile, Agent Brand of SWORD, still floating in her space bubble, hitches a ride on a passing Skrull cruiser, slipping inside. She gets a look at a lot of what’s going on via some monitors before being discovered.
I do like the idea that the villains would recognize this as a time they have to fight back, too. I can’t remember if there were any tie-ins about Dr. Doom fighting the invasion, but I sure would like to see them. Or even, like, Dr. Octopus.
Well, hey, it’s those guys. Thor isn’t dead anymore, which seems like something that would’ve impacted the Avengers comics by now, but has been largely self-contained (Written by J. Michael Straczynski, the current Thor series did include Tony stopping by to twirl his mustache and continue being the villain JMS made of him in ASM even now that the war is over). And over in Captain America, Bucky has reluctantly but inevitably taken up the mantle with Steve still dead. Him not yet appearing in Avengers stuff makes more sense to me, with him so deep in the world of covert ops. But, yeah, it’s time for Thor and the new Captain America to get involved. But first, of course, we have more tie-ins.