Yesterday, Secret Invasion # 1 arrived at the comic stores and Marvel's latest big event kicked off. I've been mildly curious about SI since it was first announced, but can't say as I've had any burning interest in it, despite all the hype building up to this week's release. For those who don't know but are interested enough to keep reading: the premise of this series is that the shape-shifting alien Skrulls (first seen waaaaaay back in Fantastic Four # 2!) have strategically been replacing Marvel characters on the sly over the past several years, as a prelude to a full-scale invasion of Earth. In other words, any Marvel character - Iron Man, Doctor Doom, the Human Torch, or even *gasp* Aunt May! - may have been replaced, years ago, by an alien imposter! The tagline for last year's Civil War series was "Whose Side Are You On?" This year it's "Who Do You Trust?"
So that's an interesting storyline, at first blush. Was the Captain America who died around this time last year a Skrull, and is that how Marvel will bring the real one back? Wolverine often seems to be everywhere all at once... are there really several of him, all Skrull dopplegangers? Has Mr Fantastic been having sex with a green-skinned alien each time that he thought he was actually bonking the beautiful Invisible Woman?
And so, in the big payoff scene from Secret Invasion # 1, we have a crashed Skrull ship from which emerges... a whole crapload of Marvel superheroes, looking much like they did in (using publishing chronology) the 1970s! There's Luke Cage wearing his "Sweet Christmas!" yellow shirt and chains, and a wise-cracking blue-furred Beast... not to mention a Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor and Wolverine! That's the sort of thing that's sure to make many a fan's jaw hit the ground as the first implications sink in!
Now, it may turn out that those new arrivals are actually the Skrulls, and they're just messing with our (and the other heroes') heads. But imagine if it plays out the other way: all those Spidey and Wolverine adventures over the past 20 or 30 years (again, publishing time... story-wise, that's about 5 to 8 years!) were about Skrull duplicates, not the real deals!
If this all sounds familiar, that may be because I blogged about it last August, when Secret Invasion was still more than half a year away. The "smell" that I described in that post was very clear and distinct to me last night, as I read through the first issue of SI. Would Marvel really dare to invalidate so much of their own history in that way? Well, last August I was incredulous on that front and unwilling to believe it, but of course that was before I watched Spider-Man's marriage magically bargained away in possibly the worst storyline of all time. So now I'm more inclined to accept that Marvel, especially the current Joe Quesada version, is indeed that stupid. And I'm interested enough to at least buy the remaining 7 issues and see how it all turns out.
Oh, and the spoilers that were posted on the Marvel_bOy website a couple weeks back? All true, as shown in the pages of SI # 1. That makes me really skeptical that Marvel willingly leaked those reveals.
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