The coming of Skrullactus

So, you know this Secret Invasion story going on in Marvel Comics at the moment? It's a story about a group of shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls who are trying to take over the world by secretly replacing various heroes, villains, babies and butlers over a period of years until they're practically running the world before anyone even knows they're here.

Two issues ago, Reed Richards invented some kind of deus ex maguffinica that shoots a beam at the ground and reveals all disguised Skrulls as Skrulls. In the latest issue, Reed turns it on the bulk of the Skrull army (who, fighting a 21st century interplanetary war, have decided to emulate the 18th century style of formal warfare, and amass all of their soldiers in one place to fight all of their enemy's soldier).

Once Reed's Skrull Revealer is activated, the Skrulls all go green, and their wrinkly chins and pointy ears appear, although most are still wearing superhero or supervillain costumes, so either they're wearing real costumes (instead of just shapeshifting them on) or the Skrull-shower only affects the area between the chin and ears.

The sixth issue ends with a double-page spread of all the real superheroes and supervillains fighting all the Skrulls (which might have been an exciting last panel, if it weren't immediately preceded by another double-page spread). In the background, we see this Skrull: Apparently, there was a Skrull disguised as Galactus, I guess. That has got to be the absolute worst Skrull disguise. Galactus is, of course, a god-like being who travels the universe looking for planets to eat and, when he usually visits Earth, it's to destroy it. So, not a very good person to dress up as when trying to secretly infiltrate Earth; chances are, all the heroes are going to confront you as soon as they see you anyway. It would be a little like if someone were trying to infiltrate Britain in the mid-1940s and decided to disguise themselve as Hitler. A giant Hitler.

Anyway, that Skrull got screwed when they were doling out disguise assignments.

On two invasions, one secret and one emphatic

Or: The Invasion! trade comes out tomorrow, and Secret Invasion still doesn't make any goddam sense to me

Tomorrow sees the long-awaited (by me) release of Invasion!, the three-part 1988 series by Bill Mantlo, Keith Giffen, Bart Sears, P. Craig Russell and little known artist Todd McFarlane.

Now, I’m not going to buy it (at least not tomorrow), as I have the originals, and like the way they smell just fine, but I always thought it was kind of insane that DC didn’t have the series collected in trade, if only because it includes pages and pages of McFarlane art, which it seems safe to assume a lot of people might want to check out now that they know who this McFarlane fellow is, and new examples of his art are getting fewer and farther between.

The story itself won’t teach you any great truths about human existence or make your teeth whiter, but it’s not at all bad for a superheroes vs. alien invaders story. Sure, there’s probably a bit too much space politics for my taste, but it’s still your favorite DC heroes of the late ‘80s whaling on alien ass. And, like each of DC’s big line-wide crossovers, it provides a nice snapshot of the ever-changing DCU; for that purpose, I think trades of each of these things, good or bad, are worthwhile (at least for fans of DC super-comics, anyway. (You know what would make me buy this tomorrow? If DC collected this, with all 30 of its tie-ins, in a black and white, cheap paper stock Showcase Presents style collection. If I did my math right, that adds up to a 900-page story. So maybe Showcase Presents: Invasion! Vols. 1 and 2. How awesome would that be?).

I’m not sure why DC decided to finally collect this series in trade now (Is it me, or has McFarlane’s star really faded in the last five years or so?), unless they simply saw Giffen’s somewhat resurgent popularity, nostalgia for the era, and the fact that DC and Marvel readers were sufficiently interested in space stuff to support books like Green Lantern Corps, Annihilation, Nova Rann/Thanagar Trade Agreement of 2007, Jim Starlin Draws Hawkman and so forth.

Personally, I think it may just be the same reason that DC decided to finally publish Millennium in trade this summer—just to be dicks to Marvel.

(I don’t mean that as a criticism; I think they should have gotten Legends out in trade the same year as Civil War, and The Flash: Hell To Pay as “One More Day” was going on. Marvel may be selling loads of these books, but it wouldn’t hurt DC to tweak their rivals by saying, “Yeah, great job on that hot new story, guys; remember when we did it, twenty years ago?”)

As I’ve spent probably way too much time already discussing, Secret Invasion shares some surface similarities with the 20-year-old DC crossover Millennium, in that both are about sinister alien forces invading earth by posing as friends and family of the superheroes there.

It also bears some similarity to Invasion!, not simply in the fact that it’s about an alien invasion because, come on, aren’t like, one-fourth of super-comics about alien invasions? It even echoes the title of the DC version.

So maybe after not making a big deal out of the similarities of other highly-hyped Marvel events to old DC stories, DC simply decided they were going to take the time to tweak their rivals here, and get Millennium and Invasion! in front of Secret Invasion readers to, if not rain on Marvel’s parade, at least piss on the corner of a street on its parade schedule.

Now, Invasion! and Secret Invasion are still very, very different stories. The latter is secret, the former is not. Also, the former makes perfect sense, whereas I’m having a hard time figuring out what the Skrull battle plan is in the latter.

In Invasion!, the race of aliens called The Dominators (who look like every sinister oriental villain fro Golden Age comics, only without the noses) convince an alliance of hostile aliens to invade Earth and remove the threat of meta-humans from the universe once and for all. So the Khunds (What if Genghis Khan’s mongol horde was pink?), the Thanagarians (Known fascist asshole Hawkman’s even more fascist asshole bretheren), the Durlans (shape-shifters familiar to Legion nerds), the hilariously named Gil’Dishpan (someone for Aquaman to fight) and several races form the Vega system who don’t use animal products and thus brought vegan culture to earth in the late ‘80s, all unite to invade earth and capture, kill or killpture all the super-heroes. They do so by dropping bombs, and shooting laser guns and suchlike, conquering Australia and hoping to go from there.

It was a pretty straightforward invasion plan. Basically, just step one, invade, step two, accept the enemies surrender, or, if they refuse to surrender, keep invading until they do.

But what the hell are the Skrulls up to, exactly? They’ve spent years planning and preparing for a very gradual invasion and, once they’ve just about rearranged earth politics to the point that they’re practically running the earth without anyone even knowing they’re there, they say, “Screw it, let’s just do it old school with infantry and so on after all.” While also pulling an elaborate bit of mental warfare on some Avengers that doesn’t really make much sense. And also appealing to the people of the world (or maybe just America?) to willingly join the Skrull Empire, while they’re simultaneously sending their shocktroopers to conquer various regions.

Pick a plan and stick with it, Skrulls!

Their main plan—infiltrating the superhero community with their own, undetectable agents—seems like a good one. They may have been involved with engineering the superhero civil war, the ejection of Hulk into space, the assassination of Captain America, the SHRA that made half of Marvel’s heroes outlaws, the Fifty-State Initiative. With a few more agents in the right places—one in for President Bush, one in for Maria Hill, one in for Tony Stark—they could rule the world without anyone being any the wiser, although they seem to shoot this idea down on account of wanting to make the likes of Tony Stark and Reed Richards suffer in a way that doesn’t include replacing them.

So this plan makes sense. If they keep it up, a good PR campaign could surely sell the American people and or the population of Earth that joining the Skrull Empire voluntarily is actually a pretty good idea.

But then, the Skrulls do their Savage Land psi-op thing, which consists of taking a group of brainwashed suicide soldier Skrulls who think they’re Marvel characters from the ‘70s, putting them on a spaceship, and crashland-ing them in the Savage Land. This sends both teams of Avengers scrambling there, and they are suddenly very confused for, like, an hour. Oh man, who do they trust? Are the heroes on the ship Skrulls, or are the heroes not on the ship the Skrulls?

You can see how this will mess with the Avengers’ minds a bit, but so what? What’s the point exactly? Especially if the Skrulls don’t even know they’re really Skrulls, like Captain Skrullmerica and Skrullckingbird? Wouldn’t they end up joining forces with the Avengers to fight off the other Skrulls?

While they’re doing that stupid little gambit, the Skrulls also attack as Skrulls. They don’t pretend to be X-Men and Avengers teaming up to destroy New York, and push public opinion against the superheroes even harder, they just start pouring Super-Skrulls into New York City (and, if you read the tie-ins, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, Wakanda and England) to start blowing shit up and fighting superheroes. Oh no, the average citizen of earth might think, alien invaders are invading and they’re completely destroying everything!

And then the really, really stupid part. There’s a weird two-page spread in Secret Invasion #5 with a million little boxes on it, and in each box, a well-known earth celebrity is shown smiling on a TV screen, each saying a snippet of the same speech: “We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to save.” They say they want the Earth to join the Skrull Empire, and in return they will end “poverty, hardship disease and greed.”

This might be a convince argument, if the Skrulls weren’t also in the middle of a violent invasion. At the center of the spread, we see a Skrull shaped like Tony Stark speaking on one of those Times Square jumbotron screens, and he says “We wish no harm or bloodshed…” and the building the screen is mounted on has a big smoking hole in it.

I was rather confused by this whole sequence, not only because it seemed to contradict the other two major aspects of the Skrull plan (secret infiltration to run the world behind the scenes, and open military attack), but because I was unsure why the Skrulls took the shapes they did. Some are celebrities here in the real world, some are Marvel characters (Dr. Doom, Namor, Magneto) and two are Marvel characters we know isn’t a Skrull (Tony Stark, Reed Richards).

So does that mean that all of these Skrulls simply took these shapes for this address, or that these people have been Skrulls all along?

See, we’re talking Ann Coulter, Stephen Colbert, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama, John McCain, The Pope, Tom Cruise, Osama bin Laden, Tiger Woods, Chris Rok, Opra, the Dali Lama, Kim Jong Il, and some others I’m less sure of (Mitt Romney? Hilary Clinton? South Park’s Cartman and Homer Simpson for some reason?).

If all of those people were just Skrulls all along, why come out and say, “Hey, we’re Skrulls! Join the Empire or die!” wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to stay in character? Like Skrullprah do some shows about how it’s time for one world government over the course of the year, and then, when a Skrull delegation comes along, start talking about how it seems like the smart thing to do? Have Skrullbama and John SkrullCain both insert “Joining the Skrull Empire” into their political parties’ respective platforms?

That is a much better plan, Skrulls!

But, like I said, it’s unclear if these are just Skrulls adopting faces they know earth people like to look at while they make their pitch, or if Tom Cruise has actually been a Skrull since Days of Thunder.

Either way, the plan is overly complicated, and each prong of attack seems to be at odds with itself. The majority of the superheroes could probably just sit the rest of this one out and watch the Skrulls defeat themselves, the way things seem to be going.

Warning: This post is totally full of swear words, and is thus NSFW (or for people who don't like the sailor-talk)

The above is a panel from Secret Invasion #5, depicting the superhero Hawkeye swearing vengeance on all Skrulls for the emotional wringer they had just put him through.

Obviously, it’s a rather goofily melodramatic panel taken out of context like this, and it’s pretty goofily melodramatic in context too. But the goofiest part is that writer Brian Michael Bendis has Hawkeye get so mad that he screams “Every @#$%ing last one of them!”

The persistence of swear words, obscured by the caps-locked number keys, in today’s comic books cracks me right the hell up.

It’s one thing to have characters swear the way that, say, Sarge does in Beetle Bailey, or Hagar in Hagar the Horrible, where it’s just a string of funny little symbols like lightning bolts and skulls mixed in with the @'s and %'s, with no clues to what they’re actually saying. But when Bendis uses the old @#$% style swears, he usually does it in such a context that it’s pretty clear what he meant to say anyway.

Hawkeye is clearly saying “Every fucking last one of them!” because that’s the only swear word that really makes sense in their, right? Bendis does this in his Avengers comics a lot: “@#$% you” is clearly “fuck you,” “Shut the @#$% up” is clearly “Shut the fuck up,” et cetera.

What I don’t really understand is why he bothers to do this. If you’re old enough to be able to read and understand that @#$% means a swear word, then you’ve heard swearing before and will just go ahead and read “fuck” in that panel with Hawkeye anyway. So not only is it the same as saying “fuck,” but it also draws attention to the fact that the writer/publisher is purposely not saying “fuck;” it’s a kind of worst of both worlds situation where the writer looks both crass and cowardly at the same time.

(Whether Marvel comics should have such language is perhaps another argument; they aren’t governed by the Comics Code Authority, they self-rate this particular comic as “Teen-Plus,” one really needs a full-time job to be able to afford Secret Invasion anyway, and is salty language any worse than scenes of shirtless Tigra being pistol-whipped in her bedroom on videotape? Or worse than our heroes totally murdering a bunch of people at the climax of this issue?)

And it’s so easily avoided, anyway. If Hawkeye simply screamed “Every last one of them!” in that panel, what would be lost, exactly, other than the comic strip swear word, reminding readers that as gritty, sexy, violent, morally ambiguous and “mature” as this Marvel comic may be, it’s still one that’s too immature to be allowed to swear like a grown-up comic?

Anyway, the reason I bring this up at all this month is because Bendis writes some pretty weird “@#$%” scenes in this issue. Because he uses those symbols so specifically, at a one “@#$%” –per-implied-word (or part of a word) ratio, you can almost always be sure of what the word is meant to be.

We’ve already mentioned that Hawkeye is probably saying “Every fucking last one of them!” Because “Every cocking last one of them!” doesn’t make sense.

Sometimes it’s slightly more ambiguous. For example, this scene of Agent Brand getting frustrated while trying to free Reed Richards before a bunch of Skrulls rush in and kill her:

She could be saying, “Fuck!” Or she could be saying, “Shit!” Both are perfectly contextually appropriate, commonly used four-letter words used to express frustration. (And here, if Bendis wanted to avoid the kiddie comic comparison, he could have just went with “Damn!” or “Crap!” or even a multi-word, "clean" expression of frustration, like, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”)

There were a couple of instances where the one-to-one @#$% for swear word substitutions just don’t really make any sense. Or else some of these people just swear funny.

So, for example, here’s Agent Brand again, giving up on a plan to trick a roomful of Skrulls into abandoning ship and deciding to just open an airlock and suck them all out into space instead:

Now, contextually, “Eh, fuck it” would make the most sense. If I were Bendis, I might have just said “Eh, screw it” to avoid having to use the @#$% symbols at all, but “screw” isn’t a bad word. So he probably meant “fuck it.”

BUT! Note that the “@#$%%” used has not four characters, as the four-letter word “fuck” does, but instead has five. Therefore, Brand used a five letter swear word that is inappropriate for a comic book readership of “Teen-Plus.”

Whatever could she have said?

Most of the swear words you don’t seem to be able to say in a non-Max Marvel comic are four letters long: Fuck, shit, piss, cock and the, um, other c-word I can’t bring myself to type.

But a five-letter swear word? Let’s see…

“Eh, bitch it.”

Unlikely; I’m fairly certain “bitch” is okay in a “Teen-Plus” book, either as a noun or verb.

“Eh, pussy it.”

“Eh, prick it.”

Nah, neither of those make any sense.

“Eh, penis it.”

Now, “penis” isn’t really a swear word, but I imagine it’s one that Marvel heroes can’t say unless maybe, maybe they’re talking about an actual penis. But I don’t think they’d let Captain America say, “God, Iron Man, why are you being such a penis about this Registration Act?”

Of course, “Eh, penis it” doesn’t make any more sense than any of the other options, but it’s the last of the five-letter swear words I can think of.

Conclusion: Agent Brand swears funny.

The other odd swear word came from Ares, the Greek god of war who is currently serving on Iron Man’s Avengers team.

Engaged in a battle against Skrulls that think they’re Avengers, Ares rushes up behind a Skrull that thinks it’s Thor and is trying to convince the Avengers that he is actually the Odinson. Ares buries his battleaxe in him mid-speech, saying:

Note that there are only three characters in this swear word, eliminating the obvious “Shut your fucking hole!” Or less obvious “Shut your pissing hole!” or “Shut your shitting hole!”

A three letter swear word?

Did Ares say, “Shut your assing hole!” to Thor before smiting him?

The only other swear word I can think of that would have three letters would be “fag,” but if he attached an “-ing” to it, you’d also add a “g,” making it, “Shut your fagging hole!” That also eliminates “cum,” which, while not technically a swear word, is still something you wouldn’t hear Spider-Man and Wolverine talking about in a Marvel comic.

So, “Shut your assing hole!” it must be. That doesn’t make very much sense, but then I think Ares is probably the kind of guy who gets so angry that he gets flustered and says some pretty nonsensical stuff in the heat of battle.

Stuff like, “Shut your assing hole!”

The hell?

In January's New Avengers: Illuminati #5, written by Brian Michael Bendis and Brian Reed, Tony "Iron Man" Stark convenes a meeting of the so-called Illuminati, the power-brokers who run the Marvel Universe's hero community behind the scenes. Among the group is Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards.

Stark shows the group the corpse of a Skrull that was posing as Elektra, and discusses the fact that it was completely undetectable. Richards suggests they perform an autopsy to figure out how the Skrull was able to mask its presence.





After some talk and a battle with some new Super-Skrulls, the allies realize they can't be sure any of them isn't also a Skrull, and Reed suggests they not only not work together on the Skrull threat, but not even talk to each other about it.







In April's Secret Invasion #1, also written by Brian Michael Bendis, Stark calls together Hank Pym and Richards and shares with them both a "secret": A Skrull has impersonated Elektra, and the Skrull was able to mask its presence. He'd like Richards and Pym to perform an autopsy to figure out how it accomplished this:








So, question time.

Obviously, in these sorts of big stories that spread across so many different titles by so many different creators, wires are occasionally crossed and story glitches arise. But usually that happens in books by two different writers, and a little farther along than the very first issue.

Did Bendis simply forget the issue he'd written a few months previously, and write the script for Secret Invasion in a way that didn't account for it?

Or is this an indication that the Stark and Richards in Illuminati #5 are supposed to be Skrulls? Or that the Stark in Richards in SI suspect the Pym there to be a Skrull and are trying to draw him out?

This is one aspect of this storyline that threatens to make the it more irritating than entertaining—any mistakes or bad writing can be blamed on a story point that likely won't be revealed until the story's just about over.