Since I didn’t want to spoiler-dodge in the monthly thread.
I read this in the car after buying it, I couldn’t resist.
Art: Yu was a good choice, I’ve liked his stuff since he was doing Wolverine.
Story: I’m not sure if I’m pissed off yet, but I can see how a lot of people are going to be pissed. Are the new guys the originals, skrulls, or copies? We don’t know yet. Interesting choice of the crash-landing roster, too. The White Queen? Jewel/Jessica Jones? Hawkeye? Clint Barton has been killed at least once since the Kree-Skrull war, would the Scarlet Witch really have resurrected a skrull copy of Barton? Clearly more questions than answers right now.
And Pym. Nice choice. Nobody gives a damn about Pym, he’s wife-beating damaged goods from Marvel’s business perspective.
I popped down the street to pick this up on the way to work.
If the heroes in the downed Skrull ship are anything BUT Skrulls, Marvel is truly descending into continuity Hell. I don’t believe it. It’s just Skrulls conditioned to believe they’re the real thing. I’ll give Bendis the benefit of the doubt though, and assume that whatever is going on will ultimately make sense.
So far, the Skrull sleeper agents are Dum-Dum Dugan, Jarvis, and Pym. The Captain Marvel appearance is a bit vague. Is he a Skrull or the real deal? His mini series hasn’t exactly cleared this up yet. Meanwhile, I need a refresher to remember who the hell Marvel Boy is. The Sue Storm skrull is just momentarily felicitous towards rolling out the carpet for the Skrull invasion.
Co-incidentally I was reading a TPB called Agents of Atlas Just Last Night(!)that had a retconned Marvel Boy in it. You’d have to read it to follow all the twists they put on his character in that one.
He was an old-timey hero from the 50’s, sort of a reverse Superman, he and his father took a rocket ship to Uranus (hee hee, no really) where he was raised in an advanced civilization. He was given some superscience bracelets and sent back to Earth to fight crime…yadda yadda yadda.
I don’t know if the Agents of Atlas thing (a bunch of old timey heroes (Gorilla Man, Jimmy Woo, Venus et al) band together to uncover mysteries and stuff, pretty good actually) is considered in continuity or not.*
It seems like Captain Marvel is actually a skrull, since he’s attacking the Thunderbolts and Bendis has indicated (in his interview at newsrama today, for instance) that attacking the Thunderbolts was part of the Skrull plan. But who knows - maybe Norman Osborn is actually the skrull agent and Marvel just showed up to confront him. Either way, we win, I think, since both of their resurrections ruined classic stories, so I’d prefer them being re-retconned. But Marvel is the more obvious choice since Osborn has done a lot since his resurrection and it would be messier to change that again.
We know at least some of the Avengers who travelled to the Savage Land are skrulls – likely Luke Cage, given the skrull-ish baby he and Jessica Jones have. The dead Captain America post-Civil War didn’t revert to a skrull like Electra did, so it’s unlikely the Captain America who got off the ship is the real deal. Similarly, given what Hawkeye’s been through, being resurrected by Scarlett Witch, it’s unlikely that he would have been brought back if he was always a skrull. Same with Wolverine, since he already had a skrull duplicate recently. Similarly Scarlett Witch is unlikely to be real since that would completely invalidate all the dissembled/House of M stuff, because if a skrull had the power to alter reality like she did, then there was no need for a blunt instrument like an invasion. And Spider-man has been through so many clone/goofy things, there’s no chance the guy getting off the ship is real. Same with Thor and Jean Grey.
So who does that leave getting off the ship as potentially “real”:
“Emma Frost” – her inclusion is strange, but making ‘our’ emma a skrull invalidates so much of recent x-men history that it seems really unlikely.
“luke cage” – very possibly real, given the skrull bably with Jessica
“jessica jones” - possibly real for similar reasons, although far less likely given how much of her books were written from her insecure, human thought process.
“wonder man” - possibly real. One of the more likely candidates.
“susan storm” - possibly real, especially since we saw a fake Susan already. One of the more likely candidates.
“beast” - almost certainly not real, given his role in the x-men trying to find a cure to house of M, would invalidate Grant Morrison’s secondary mutation stuff arbitrarily, etc.
“vision” - possibly real, although the version that was destroyed obviously wasn’t a skrull, so that’s unlikely.
“Iron Man” - they’re hinting that the current tony could be a skrull, but I hope that’s not the case since it just makes much of Civil War goofy.
“Mockingbird” - probably fake, since the one who died previously didn’t revert to a skrull, and was featured in the afterlife in Xstatix
Ms. Marvel - possibly real, since we know there’s a fake ms marvel around, but it’s unlikely since the fake ms. marvel was already confronted (and framed) the apparently real ms. marvel.
That’s all of them. I’m still leaning towards “all fake”, perhaps not realizing it.
Agents of Atlas is awesome, and probably my favorite hardcover from last year. Members of the team have appeared in the non-continuity Marvel Adventures comics. The team next appears in the Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust? one-shot, which would make the mini-series in continuity.
The Fake Sue Storm we saw in that issue doesn’t seem to have been in place prior to this issue though. If real Sue was replaced by a Skrull earlier, why would that Skrull sneak into the Baxter Building tour as a civilian and then switch to Sue just to get in and wreak havoc. And if real Sue was just replaced by a Skrull, then that definitely wouldn’t be real Sue on the crashed ship. I got the impression that real Sue wasn’t even replaced at all so much as she was just briefly impersonated to get access to the building in this issue.
I’m going with the “all-fake-except-for-one” theory about the heroes from the ship. As Desslock pointed out, having Scarlet Witch, Cap, Spidey, Wolverine, etc. be long-time Skrulls would destroy a lot of Marvel continuity, so I’d say the ship is all Skrulls who got lost/were delayed, who were meant to replace their counterparts years ago but showed up way too late.
Having discovered these never-activated sleeper agents, a tentative circle of trust for the real heroes (ala the Vampire games) will be established, except that one of the “Skrulls” from the ship will turn out to be a “real” hero because of the inevitable twist.
Yeah. The penultimate issue of the Captain Marvel mini-series ‘suggests’ he’s a Skrull, but there’s a slight implication that the Skrulls are trying to deceive him into believing he’s a sleeper Skrull. The 1st issue of SI appears to be a confirmation of his Skrull-hood, but until it plays out, who knows?
Anyone else read the final issue, #5, of Captain Marvel? Marvel is a skrull, and knows it. The interesting twist, however, is that the imprinting of the original Captain Marvel’s psyche & DNA was so deep, so successful, that Skrull-Vell rejects his past as a Skrull and decides to carry on the name of Marvel as sworn protector of Earth.
Thus, the scene in SI #1 where he crashes the party at Tbolts HQ now suggests that there’s another skrull who has infiltrated the Thunderbolts. Skrull-Vell is there to kick their ass.
That was a great twist…really kind of sad. It’s also the best of all worlds as far as I’m concerned - it likely means Osborn is a skrull and therefore was actually killed in ASM122, and they’ll erase two of the worst retcons in recent memory. But even if that’s not the case, I still found it a moving development, and it should certainly make that aspect of Secret Invasion more interesting.
suggesting that the Skrull Queen and instigator of the Invasion months ago took the identity of Spider-woman. She did just sort of reappear in the Marvel universe, but they filled that backstory with some pretty complicated stuff, like her working as a triple agent for Fury, SHIELD and Hydra, and seemingly going out of her way do be loyal to Fury and the Avengers in those roles - when she let Viper, Madame Hydra, escape, for instance, she went out of her way to save Captain America who would otherwise have died as a result of her actions. If she was actually the Skrull Queen then, you’d think she’d be quite pleased to have removed Captain America from the playing field (maybe the Skrulls eventually did). I kind of hope this is just a tease and not a reveal that sticks.
The implications of the rest of the issue are kind of confusing though: they almost seem to be saying that all the skrulls in place have to remain completely normal until they make their move. Like, if they want to keep their cover, they have to act completely normal at all times, presumably until some trigger wakes them, so they can remain undetected by telepaths. So it may be possible that for the important characters who would be subject to a lot of scrutiny, they don’t even realize they’re skrulls until the switch is flipped. It’s hard to say if that’s exactly what they were saying because it would sort of reduce their effectiveness while infiltrating us.
The issue seemed to say that the more prominent a character the skrulls replace, the more passive their role has to be to avoid detection—which makes sense—but it wasn’t clear just how far that logic took us. So it may be that Spider-woman didn’t even know she was a skrull except for once a week at 4am when her skrully brain switched on and she sleep-walked her way over to a computer to email her skrull friends everything she learned this week, then fell back asleep and woke up none the wiser.
