Secret Invasion
***Spoilers for a fifteen year old super popular comics event***
With the first couple of episodes of Disney/Marvel’s SECRET INVASION out on Disney, and it being forever since I’ve posted to the newsletter (I’m working on a non-fiction book and once the chapters are in better shape I’ll drop them for my paid subscribers), I thought I’d take a moment to write about the comic SECRET INVASION.
A Note On Footnotes: This time around I’m using my love of footnotes to tell you, dear reader, where some of these stories have appeared in TV and movies.
SECRET INVASION, the 2008 story of the Skrulls (green shape changing aliens with chins that are best described as scrotums or scrotum-like) infiltrating and invading the Earth, starts long before the first of its 8 issue mini series run.
As an event steeped in the continuity of Marvel comics, one filled with call backs and character beats both self and continuity referential, this is an easy and obvious assessment. It’s especially obvious given that the story of SECRET INVASION itself was seeded in the first issue of 2005’s New Avengers, a title that was originally going to house the whole of what became the SECRET INVASION event.
For the uninitiated a comics event is a crossover where the story plays out across multiple titles, and impacts (and often derails) either the whole publishing line, or at minimum the titles in a certain publishing group (X-Men, the Batman Family, the Avengers titles, etc.). Events are, largely, a marketing gimmick, a hype machine to gin up excitement and cross politate readers, usually promising how “nothing will ever be the same”, which is a lie because comics loves nothing better than to change than to change right back.
So yes, the actual narrative arc of SECRET INVASION started in New Avengers number one (which came about after Avengers Disasemble, the ‘mildly’ controversial story where Wanda “The Scarlet Witch” Maximoff goes bonkers and kills a bunch of Avengers and makes the team break up1), but before we talk about that New Avengers, and all of the shape changing “who can you trust” carnage that spilled out of its pages and… thematically… on to TV, we need to talk about why there needed to be a “NEW” Avengers in the first place.And for that my friends, we need to travel back in time to 1991, and The X-Men.
Here’s the thing, The Avengers, the team of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, Ant Man, The Wasp, and all the rest, suck.They’ve always sucked, and they’ve never actually been cool. The Avengers was always a boring, milquetoast superhero bullshit book full of nothing but janky melodrama, stupid alien nonsense, time travel, Infinity space marbles, and even more time travel.You might be thinking, “Gee Max, that just sounds like superhero comics” and you’d be right. That’s because “Superhero Comics” by and large suck, and are also not particularly cool.
But let me clarify something here. A comic with a superhero in it isn’t a Superhero Comic. Superheroes are characters, and Superhero Comics are a genre. The genre of the Superhero Comic is one focused on larger than life exploits, veering from space opera to time travel odyssey, to inter-dimensional magical realms, and anything everything that is large, and likely world threatening, in between. They are action stories where the appeal is not the character, but the size and shape of the spectacle that the heroes face with powers equal to the size of the danger, danger which is ever escalating.
The Superhero Comic, or story, is the bread and butter of the MCU movies, big, flashy, seeing characters only reacting to external threats, and having just as much character as needed (in the movies this is done with lazy quips instead of conversation and dialogue) to get you to minimally invest, while the art in the comics (and the special effects and fight scenes in the movies) carry the weight of the story’s strength, instead of share it with the story itself.
So yeah, the Avengers, like DC’s Justice League, and just tons of other Superhero Stories suck on a fundamentally boring level. They suck in the execution mind you, not the premise, because premise comes from the characters, and characters “can” always be interesting.
Do you know who is always interesting?
Okay, hold on, do you know who tends to start from a place of being very interesting, and it’s up to the creators and editorial to fuck it all up?
That’s right, The X-Men.
The premise of the X-Men, people born different and with remarkable powers, thrust into a world that fears and hates them, is so strong that even when they’re thrown into time travel, clones, aliens, magical realms, and all the other trappings of boring superhero fare, they don’t just stay interesting, they stay cool.
There was nothing cool about The Avengers before the movies (and arguably that hasn’t changed), and this was especially true in 1991, when the X-Men books were hitting their peak of popularity, one that would last a few years, include the 90s cartoon, and then fade before the movie came out in the year 2000.You might think “fade” is an interesting choice, but when X-Men number one came out, thanks to the speculator market, and multiple covers,it sold 8.2 million copies. That’s also the reason it’s not now, nor ever will be worth anything.(Not to be confused with Uncanny X-Men #1 which came out in… I think 1963, which is worth a whole lot of money.)
The coolness of the X-Men, some of their spin-off books, and Spider-Man at the time as well was due to the artists working on the books, guys with distinct modern visions of the characters and a willingness to take advantage of advances in color and print technologies that allowed work to be detailed, compared to older print limitations. These artists, who were making books that were selling millions, and who were responsible for the success of their titles and their coolness, and they were getting fucked over by Marvel, so they left and formed Image comics, and while that didn’t sink Marvel financially, it was a component of Marvel’s rolling towards bankruptcy.
In the late 90s, due to unsustainable business practices, shady leadership, and too much to get into here, Marvel declared bankruptcy. Or came close. I don’t remember exactly what, but bankruptcy is a legal term, and what you dear reader might find interesting is that to stay afloat Marvel sold the rights to their characters etc. to a bunch of different movie studios, and that’s why Disney had to buy Fox to get some of them back etc.
The other interesting part is that post bankruptcy Marvel tried a bunch of stuff to turn their business around, including hiring a bunch of indie writers and artists to try new things with their books.Comics had hit a level of gluttony in the 90s, swollen up with even more alternate covers, gommics, and cascades of very 90s nonsense… on top of books that were built on 90s nonsense, and eventually it all fell apart, so Marvel needed to do something to mix it up.
Corresponding with the launch of the X-Men movie, Marvel launched the Ultimate line, a line of comics that saw their core characters updated for modern times, starting with Ultimate X-Men, and Ultimate Spider-Man.Both of these books turned out to be very successful, and led to the launch of the Ultimates, which were The Avengers but in this new alternate universe… and the thing is, The Ultimates were cool as shit.At least that was the overt intention.
Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? That came from The Ultimates, so did a lot of visual sensibilities for the movies etc. because again, they were the contemporary (post 9/11 America) version of The Avengers. But Marvel is and always has been a legacy media company, and The Ultimates were not the real Avengers, not the main line actual legacy characters, so editorial had an idea, “Why don’t we get the guy writing the Ultimate X-Men and the Ultimates to write a new Avengers book?”
That guy doing the writing?
The cynical, hyper violent, absurd, and very Scottish, Mark Millar.Millar, who also wrote Kick-Ass, Kingsmen, and Wanted, all comics turned into movies you may have seen or at least heard of, is a polarizing creator. He has a fraught relationship with some beloved comics writers, essentially just writes creator owned books (books he owns, not the company that publishes them) as movie pitches, and his sense of humor and love for grit, gritty, hyper-violence doesn’t land well with people that want more joy from their books, compared to grim amusement and cool satisfaction.Millar, who is also reportedly a very kind and decent person, loves the characters he writes about, but much like me, has little interest in the Superhero Story Genre by itself and as it is.
For the record, I generally love Millar, and while I don’t love all of his work, there’s a sense of humor and sensibility overlap between us. The first book of his I read was Ultimate X-Men number one, and I’ve been a fan ever since. It was the book that brought me back to Marvel after giving up on them during the 1996 Age of Apocalypse event. Without getting too into it, I started reading Marvel books in the summer of 1992 thanks to X-Force, and took it personally when four years later this was this line wide events was blowing up everything I’d come to love.
So, as Marvel started to build creative and commercial momentum again in the early 2000s, elevated by new, dynamic voices and artists, they had a creative summit to see about, plan, and launch new books, including New Avengers.
It was at this summit that Millar said (roughly) “If the Avengers are supposed to be Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, why don’t we put all the popular characters in the book?”
So the idea of an Avengers team with Spider-Man, Wolverine, the newly reinvigorated Daredevil, and Avengers stalwarts Captain America and Iron Man came to be, and MIllar was going to write it.
But due to health issues, he couldn’t take on the book and it fell to Brian Michael Bendis, author of Ultimate Spider-Man and the newly revitalized Daredevil to take on the task..
Most of you already know that Brian Bendis is my favorite comics writer, but you might not know why… or if you know comics and his work, and are not a fan, you might not see how anyone could say he was their favorite.
It’s because Superhero Stories suck, but superheroes are cool, and like Millar, he knows this.
When I say they know they suck, I think they’d disagree (well Millar might not…) with that, and instead say something like “there was room for different kinds of storytelling in these stories”, which is the polite way of saying they’re boring and suck, or are outdated and decidedly uncool. So, with New Avengers Bendis started writing a conspiracy thriller set in the world of superheroes, with superhero characters trying to face and solve a conspiracy mystery while dealing with the world exploding all around them.
The whole of SECRET INVASION in the comics can be boiled down to this idea that Bendis has talked about a lot… A LOT… across his books.“When the Kingpin wants something, he has his guys commit a big visible crime over here, while he silently moves in and takes the thing he wants while everyone is distracted.”
It’s street level storytelling writ on a global scale. It’s a conspiracy, and that conspiracy was “The Skrulls have slowly but surely been replacing critical people in the world government and in superhuman circles with their own undetectable agents as part of a holy war to claim planet Earth as their new home world.”
So, while House of M happened where Scarlet Witch said “No more mutants” and depowered all but a hundred and eighteen mutants (or something like that number), and Civil War2 split the hero world in half, leading to the New Avengers team becoming outlaws, there was this creeping, constant, unknown threat tightening the noose, and pulling strings. House of M and Civil War weren’t caused by the Skrulls, but the Skrulls used those events, and caused other ones take take enemies off the board and dig in deeper.
New Avengers, which didn’t end up including Daredevil for a few editorial and creative reasons, was a success, and Bendis started to write not just events like House of M, but spin-off titles like Mighty Avengers, which come out after the Civil War event mini series (which Millar wrote) and told the story of the non-outlaw Avengers, and Illuminati3 which was about Iron Man, Reed Richards, Professor X, Dr. Strange, and Black Bolt of the Inhumans (no one cares about the Ihumans…) secretly trying to run, control, and keep the world safe, became an editorial line unto itself.
Bendis staked out and developed a corner of the Marvel universe, and used all of those titles to build towards one massive confrontation.
The eight issue SECRET INVASION miniseries.
It was the culmination of an alien invasion story, but what made it good wasn’t the scope of the threat or even the core concept, no, what made it good was the dynamism, and the humanity of the story, a story that was meticulously told over three years, that focused on the human cost of being a superhero, the inanity of living in that world, and in sum total ran over about a hundred issues of comics.
Also, it helped center Luke Cage as a narrative point of view character in new Avengers and made him more popular than he ever was before that moment.(I asked Bendis at a panel once about changing his point of view character from Cage to Hawkeye post SECRET INVASION and he denied that Cage was ever the POV character for the book, but New Avengers was the Luke Cage and Jessica “Spider-Woman” Drew book that also had Spider-Man and Wolverine in it.)
SECRET INVASION was about an external threat, but it was a street level story about heroes who were both on their back foot personally as their worlds and friendships fell apart, who actually had to make choices about how to do the right thing.Who can you trust (the tagline of the event) when your enemies could be anyone, and would ultimately be revealed to have been, including your team members?
Was Tony Stark a Skrull? Was that why he got behind the superhero registration act that set off Civil War?
Was it the Skrulls who killed Captain America after Civil War?
No one was safe, people were dying, and the stakes in the world of the New Avengers team, book, and ancillary titles felt both real, and relatable… because they were happening to characters, and the characters were living in those moments and making hard choices.Then, in the mini series which was the conclusion to this massive story, when the end game hit, and you saw who was behind everything all long, when all the pieces came together, after years apart, the Avengers (and a bunch of heroes and villains) assembled to finally fight back.
And while that final fight was full of capes and lasers and superhero shenanigans, it was filled with character driven moments and the fight didn’t happen to tell the story, the fight happened because of the story.
For my taste, the Bendis run of New Avengers that went from 2005-2010, and the Ed Brubaker run of Captain America that ran parallel (and saw the introduction of the Winter Soldier, the Death of Captain America, and said Winter Soldier having a run as Cap4) are the high points of these characters. They are the most human, and the most grounded, and in turn have something to say about themselves. They’re written by people who want to use these characters to tell different stories with and about the characters, and to do something other than have space lasers and punching.
This is also the peak of what’s been called decompressed storytelling, a mode of comics storytelling that is slower than the high speed comics of the pas and generally the present, and has also been called “writing for the trades”, the trades being the paperback collections of the 5-5 issues that would make up a story arc. When done well, decompressed storytelling creates and lives by character moments, dialogue, and space for the art to do more subtle and varied things… though some people would argue that it also just leads to a lot of talking heads, both in art and in story.
I loved decompressed storytelling because it lets the characters be characters, or at least allows the writers to have more space to share their versions of the characters and their ideas for them. For plenty of readers the draw is the character, for me, the draw is the creative talent. I wouldn’t have started reading New Avengers if not for who was writing it, and the same is true for the aforementioned Captain America run. For me, the creators have pretty much always mattered more than the characters.
Even going back to my start with X-Force and then moving over to the X-Men, I was already essentially just following the writer I liked. That was more happenstance than intent, but he didn’t come back to the books he was writing when after Age of Apocalypse ended, the line went back to normal.
When they happened I did try to hop back on, but the magic… or more importantly… the writer and the direction he was going in was gone.
SECRET INVASION was a high point and a climax (one of several) that came during my peak of comics reading, especially my Marvel reading, and it was a climax and a peak that happened in a story that felt like it was written specifically for my tastes, free of the lame stuff I genuinely don’t like about comics.
And it has one of my favorite comics lines of all time.
The Skrulls have made their big attack. They’re winning, the world is in chaos, and Maria Hill, who has taken over SHIELD, put in that position by the Skulls because they think she’ll be more amenable to surrender, fins herself staring down a bunch of the shape shifting invaders.
Little do we the readers, or the Skrulls know, she’s replaced herself with a life-model-decoy, a robot that looks like you, that you can pilot and speak through etc. And when she is faced with surrender she saus, “When this is all over I’m going to get a t-shirt…”
As seen, sort of in WandaVision and in Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
Which you may have seen a version of in Captain America 3: Civil War, which was conceptually similar in that Cap and Iron Man were on different sides if an ideological divide after a disaster, that’s about all they had in common.
Which you may have seen in Dr. Strange and Multiverse of Madness… sorta.
As kinda seen in Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier.