Mighty Avengers: Secret Invasion

Mighty Avengers: Secret Invasion Book 2 (Brian Michael Bendis) collects issues #16-20 of Mighty Avengers, five single-issue stories each serving to illuminate a character or situation from Secret Invasion.

It's an uneven collection. Three of the stories are quick character sketches, heavy on swordfights or explosions but light on plot. One issue shows how Elektra was captured by the Skrulls and her doppleganger took control of the Hand ninja clan. Two very similar issues depict Skrull sleeper agents becoming overly influenced by the personalities they're attempting to replicate, and ultimately getting cut down by their own kind. Reading these vignettes, one can't help but wonder if Bendis stretched himself just a little too thin between the main Secret Invasion mini, his pair of Avengers titles (and the Dark in development), Powers, etc. There are some fascinating moments here, and snatches of typically Bendis dialogue (which I love), but they read a little like official Secret Invasion fanfic. They're drabbles.

The Nick Fury issue is stronger, another preview story for the new Secret Warriors. We learn what it's like to be a super-powered teenager in training with the world's oldest, grumpiest master spy. It made me wish that the actual Secret Warriors book was written this tightly and hope that it will be, once Jonathan Hickman has a little more time to settle into the concept.

But it's the final story that makes the whole book worth the price of admission. Hank Pym (a.k.a. Ant Man a.k.a. Giant Man a.k.a. Goliath a.k.a. Yellowjacket, soon to be the new Wasp [MPD much? - RD]) returns from Skrull captivity to face a radically new Marvel universe. He wasn't there for House of M or Civil War or World War Hulk, and even the Secret Invasion was over when he finally stepped out of that Skrull spaceship.

His friends have turned on each other, torn the superhero community apart, and his wife (Janet Van Dyne, the Wasp) is dead. Of course it's at the funeral that he finally breaks down, lashes out inevitably and inappropriately. His grief, coupled with the way in which Thor steps in for his friend, quite literally put tears in my eyes. Granted, anyone who knows me will attest that's not entirely rare, but even so, it's an outstanding and moving story. Plus, we get to see Clint Barton drop the F-bomb (okay, technically the "*$#%!"-bomb) on Norman Osborn in a church. What's not to love about that?

- JC

Secret Invasion: Front Line

Who says this isn't the Marvel Age of Disaster Movies? First Bendis gave us that angle on Ultimatum in Ultimate Spider-Man, and now I find Brian Reed has done the same for Bendis' own Secret Invasion. And like in most disaster movies, the story's impact comes from who lives and who dies.

Secret Invasion: Front Line follows reporter Ben Urich as he makes his way through the chaos of Manhattan during the Skrull invasion, hooking up with other non-super powered citizens and fighting just to get out of the way of the war.

Back in the 90s, you'd watch a movie like Jurassic Park or Volcano and you'd more or less know ahead of time who was going to die, brutally and Darwinistically - the old and weak perished while the young, pretty, and witty survived. More recent examples of the genre have gleefully turned the formula on its head, keeping a plucky old guy alive and killing someone younger and stronger for the surprise. SI: Front Line works that way too, but Brian Reed manages to deliver a new twist to the game in its last few pages.

Throughout the issue, Ben Urich talks about wanting to get home to his wife, Doris. She was in the shower when he left that morning, and he forgot to say "I love you," on the way out the door. Nothing particularly novel so far; any movie-goer would tell you that Urich's the goner, right? But what we don't learn until the very end is that Doris has been very ill, and she passed away during the day her husband spent surviving the attack. We find Ben talking to his therapist, explaining how in the final hours he was just wandering the streets, muttering notes into his tape recorder, and realizing he could have just walked back home to his wife, could have been there in time, and he wasn't. He made notes for a story he now finds he can't even write.

It's a stunning death because it happens to a character we never see and for reasons entirely unrelated to the plot. It's perfectly foreshadowed but completely unexpected, like all the best literary surprises. And it matters, because Brian Reed has made sure that whether we knew him from previous Marvel Universe appearances or met him for the first time in this book, we care about Ben Urich. Reed makes a grand, colorful sci-fi epic into a beautifully sad, down-to-earth story about the life that slips past us when we're looking at the big picture.

- JC

Dark Reign: New Nation

As part of the Dark Reign storyline, Marvel put out a book of five 8-page previews of new series or minis set to launch within the next few months. What's fascinating is how each of these writers handle the task of getting a comic into about a third of the normal length.

War Machine: Crossing the Line (Greg Pak) and Skrull Kill Krew: Breakfast in America (Adam Felber) are both pretty standard short stories. They're both simple and true to the premise of their respective books. In War Machine, Iron Man's friend James Rhodes goes looking for bad guys to kill because he's a soldier and has no problem with killing. For this 8-page short, he finds a bad guy and kills him. Skrull Kill Krew is pretty much the same thing, only the main dude's killing Skrulls. Again, the story is short and predictable, solid writing with a few good jokes but nothing outstanding.

In Secret Warriors: Declaration, Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman give us a glimpse inside Nick Fury's head. Fury's new team has already been introduced through a sort of backdoor pilot in Bendis' New Avenger series, so the short just sets the tone for the ongoing book. Rather than trying to cram a story into 8 pages, this is more of a vignette - if it were fanfic, it would be a drabble. It works well for what it is; Bendis writes good dialogue, so we get to see a classic Captain America WWII speech with a Band of Brothers feel. It's also interesting to see an old soldier/spy approaching the 21st century War on Terror with his 1940s idealism intact.

Agents of Atlas: The Heist was probably my favorite story in the book. I met Gorilla Man in X-Men: First Class and was looking forward to seeing him in action with his team. Jeff Parker really used the 8-page format brilliantly, introducing a group of people I was expecting to be superheroes, yet here they are stealing all the gold from Fort Knox. The reason for the heist ties into the Dark Reign overplot, but we get a full adventure that sets the group up for what's to come. It works as a short story because the idea is so simple; we get 6 pages to see how they pull off the heist and a couple pages at the end to find out why. It's not a standard plot for a super team, and it works beautifully.

The story that actually got me to pick up the book, and the one I'll probably follow in series form, was New Avengers: The Reunion: Suspicion (Jim McCann). It's about the aftermath of Secret Invasion, with Ronin and Mockingbird reunited. I was intrigued by interviews with the writer that showed he was very excited about the relationship dynamics between these two, and, as previously blogged, I liked what I saw of Mockingbird's return from years of captivity on a Skrull homeworld. The story is a prelude of what's to come rather than a self-contained plot, and it does an interesting job of showing us Mockingbird's mental state. She's returned to a changed Earth, where some friends have died, and others have fought one another in a Civil War. Her husband is just glad she's home and ready to act like nothing happened, but she's working through some PTSD and trying to figure out who she is and what the world is now. I came into this short hoping for a great superhero love story, and I still think and hope that's where Reunion is headed, but what I got was a great psychological study. Now I'm not just excited about where Ronin and Mockingbird are headed as a couple. I'm equally invested in where Mockingbird's journey is taking her alone and how she'll balance her past and her future.

- JC

Incredible Hercules: Sacred Invasion

I'm really enjoying Incredible Hercules (Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente) as a series. You've got a superhero who is also the classical definition of a hero - half god, half human - who is thousands of years old and trying to grapple with the modern world of superheros with a boy genius at his side (see previous post on Amadeus Cho). It's somewhat similar to certain episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which claims that Kevin Sorbo is the real Hercules who is producing a TV show about his life, but rather than the half-god going incognito, Incredible Hercules is out and proud and facing a world full of all kinds of supers - mutants, aliens, chemically enhanced soldiers, and more.

With Sacred Invasion, the writers have taken it to another level and created I think the cleverest crossover tie-in I've ever seen. While the Skrulls are invading Earth, Herc's sister Athena calls a conference of all human deities and says if the Skrulls win, the deities will lose their followers and be destroyed as well. They decide to fight back by directly attacking the Skrull gods, and they form a strike force (which Amadeus quickly labels the God Squad). Herc's team includes the Inuit SnowBird, the Mayan Eternal Ajak, a Japanese god of death who speaks in haiku, and an Egyptian god (I forget which one). They travel in a ship, granted to them by an Aboriginal deity, that moves through the dreamtime to seek out the Skrull gods and kick their butts.

It's not just the usual crossover story ("and THESE heroes fought the bad guys over THERE!"); it's unique to these characters and a brilliant side of the larger conflict to explore. And then it's grounded in world mythology, and that's always a big win with me.

- JC

Secret Invasion #2

In Issue #2 of Secret Invasion (Brian Michael Bendis), Hawkeye apparently gets his wife back. Mockingbird was killed off many years ago (in reader time, at least), but returns in the midst of the Skrull takeover. So, like anyone faced with a "Would the Real Superhero Please Stand Up?" Hawkeye asks her about something that only his real wife would know, something they never shared with anyone else. He asks his wife to remind him of the significance of October 12.

"The baby we lost, Mockingbird replies, "October 12th would have been the birthday. It... would have been a nice day."

What I found fascinating was not the fact that Hawkeye used the date as his password question, but that these people, who have been through one of the most horrible things that a couple can experience, don't talk about it as something that haunts them. They just say, "It would have been a nice day."

When I look at characterization that works, I see superheros as people that we want to be. It's not just that they have the powers and the vision that we wish we had; they find the strength to put personal tragedies in perspective. I think most people could be consumed with grief at losing a child, and though it's clear that the couple were deeply saddened by their loss, they chose to focus on how happy they would have been. It's a subtle but vast distinction.

Hawkeye and Mockingbird have been described as the Mr. and Mrs. Smith of the Marvel universe. I don't know these characters particularly well yet, but I'm really looking forward to seeing where they go from here.

And hey, it's nice to see Marvel un-kill a marriage for once.

- JC

Secret Invasion

The series is a culmination of several plot lines in recent Marvel books where the Skrulls - shape-changing aliens - have been working for a while to take over the Earth, and have been replacing various superheroes to do this. There's a really neat two-page spread where you see Times Square and all these TV screens with Skrull versions of politicians, superheroes, and TV personalities. They claim to have been observing the poverty and war on Earth for some time, and have now come to help us fix our problems.

Their announcement includes the statement, "Once we have settled in, we will begin replacing your energy sources and your borders. All areas of modern conflict will be moot." It's every invasion in human history, with the invaders trying to convince the invaded that they were being liberated. But like in our own recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Skrulls have an ulterior motive after all - their own resources are limited and they're hoping to settle some of their population to Earth. They don't have the humility to simply ask for what they need, they must bring their religion and intelligence to make the planet a better place. They're doing Earth a favor - one that humans don't necessarily want or need.

The question becomes which of the invaders truly believe they're doing the right thing, and which of them know that their population needs the resources Earth represents - and how much of either of those viewpoints justifies what they're doing.

Also, though the point isn't made overtly, the final issue seems to imply that it's actually President G.W. Bush who puts Norman Osborn in the position of power that leads to Dark Reign. As Marvel likes to reflect the current political situation, and they're about to do their Obama inauguration thing, it suggests that W. is the president who hands Norman, and by extension a cabal of supervillians, the keys to the kingdom. It's a nice bold stroke.

- JC