SuperSearnold - Comic Book Reviews

Greetings from your friendly neighborhood Searnold [Shár- Nŭhld].  Welcome to my comic book review blog.

I am officially dubbing this week Secret Invasion week.  A bunch of tie-in titles came out on Wednesday 8-13, and I’m going to spend the week reviewing them all.  So today, to kick off Secret Invasion Week, I’m going to review the story thus far (up until 8-13).

For those of you who have heard of the invasion (this summer’s major Marvel crossover) but don’t know what it’s about, I’ll give you a little teaser.  The shapeshifting aliens called the Skrulls have invaded Earth.  It’s a full fledged war.  But it’s a bit more complicated than that because the Skrulls are shapeshifters who recently discovered a way to walk amoung us undetected by science, magic, or even Wolverine’s heightened senses.  Right  after the Civil War, the New Avengers discovered that Elektra (who had been running the evil ninja organization called The Hand) was actually a Skrull (see New Avengers #31 - sorry for putting out a spoiler to that 2 year old issue, but it’s key to the premise of the invasion.)

So for a while now the Avengers have been freaking out and not quite sure what it meant or what to do.  First of all, any of them could be Skrulls - a thought that has sewed seeds of distrust for the past two years.  They also suspected that this was a precursor to an all out invasion, and of course they were right.  And now that the Skrulls have invaded, how can the heroes fight them when they can’t even trust each other?

Based on that basic premise, I really enjoyed the idea of Secret Invasion.  The fact that Bendis had been planning this and sewing seeds for 5 years since he first took over writing The Avengers is proof that this event was well planned.  Overall, it’s been a fun ride.

But I have two problems with Secret Invasion.  The first is too much hype.  I think they took a little too long getting to the actual invasion.  Because of this, there were a few months where it seemed like EVERYONE in the Marvel universe was a Skrull.  That got old after about 6 months.  It also made it difficult for me to read books that didn’t mention the invasion.  I kept thinking “How are you just going about your business without reacting to this?”

The second problem is a continuity issue.  Even now that the event is in full swing, there are serious continuity issues.  Mostly, we won’t know until it’s all over who is or is not a Skrull or how long they’ve been a Skrull.  Joe Quesada (editor-in-chief of Marvel comics) openly admits that Bendis didn’t tell anyone else about his plans until after Civil War.  But there are characters who have been Skrulls since BEFORE Civil War.  Thus, retcon.  It’s possible that they’ll handle this well… but I doubt it.  It would have been much better if they had known through Civil War which characters were Skrulls.  The other problem with continuity comes with placing other large events such as One More Day and Messiah Complex.  There have been no clues so far as to what order these major crossover events happen in which displeases me.

One final thing to mention is the way that Marvel publishes its summer crossovers - a core mini-series plus tie-in issues… and occasionally a few other mini-series.  Many people have problems with this because they force you to buy who knows how many books in order to get the full story.  I understand that argument, but vehemently disagree with it.  What’s great is that you don’t have to buy any of the tie-ins to understand the core mini-series.  And all you really need to know about the core mini in order to understand the tie-ins is that Skrulls have invaded.  But if you WANT to buy all of the issues then you CAN and you get a much larger and more expansive story than ANY other medium could possibly give you.  Thus the mighty power of comic books.

So to recap: Secret Invasion was planned well by Bendis but not well by the rest of Marvel.  The secrets were fun, but the hype dragged on too long.  However, now that they’ve moved on from “Who do you trust?” mode into “Embrace change” mode (i.e. from impending to invasion to mid-invasion) - I’m excited to see where this event is going.

Stay tuned the rest of the week for reviews of various Secret Invasion tie-in issues.

Thanks for reading.  See you next time.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS