Comic: "Secret Invasion #2"
Published by: Marvel Comics
Written by: Bendis
Artist: Yu
Reviewer: Max Burbank
Posted: 6/1/2008
Plot: Lots of Heroes who may or may not be Skrulls run around the savage land hitting each other. Then a spaceship lands in New York and all these Skrulls that have bits and pieces of lots of different Marvel Hero costumes and props all mixed up get out and start blowing shit up.
Review: I don’t now. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just old. Maybe if my synapses were slightly more elastic I wouldn’t feel this way.
But do this. Play along with me, check me here. Go to Wikipedia or any comic book website you favor and look up a synopsis of the Spider Clone Saga. Read it. I’ll wait.
You done? Now tell me what things the real Spiderman did and what things the clone Spider-Man did. No checking! Which Spider-Man failed to save Gwen Stacy’s life? Which Spider-Man went off to the Secret War planet and got hooked up with the black costume that would turn out to be Venom? Which Spider-Man first dated Mary Jane and which Spider-Man married her? Tell you what, fucked if I know. Writers and readers alike pretty much have had to pretend the whole thing never happened.
Now, take that classic clusterfuck. And multiply it by the dozen or so Superheroes that popped out of the Skrull ship I the Savage Land. Viola. Some of them are Skrulls and some of them are not. We’re totally supposed to believe that Mockingbird is the real deal, because she knows a secret Clint Barton knows that nobody else would. So the Mockingbird that died, what, like over a decade ago in some shitty ass West Coast Avengers read by nobody pile wasn’t the REAL Mockingbird. Except Hawkeye just came back from the dead himself. Unless the Hawkeye that died was a Skrull. And hey, don’t forget that the Skrulls have unlocked all of the heroes powers, so whose to say Mockingbird didn’t Professor X the secret info out of Hawkeye’s head unless of course the current Hawkeye is a Skrull. And like that isn’t stupid enough, what about Phoenix? Oh, for the love of God Phoenix, who has already died and come back, what, like eight times? And please don’t forget that a whole lot of what you think Jean Grey did in the comics wasn’t her anyway. Jean Grey was in a cocoon on the bottom of the ocean and the Phoenix force did half the crap you thought she did including getting killed on the moon. That’s without mixing in at what point the original Jean Grey might have been replaced by a fucking Skrull. What if the Jean Grey that died in a space shuttle crash back in X-Men 90 something wasn’t Jean Grey to begin with? What if the Phoenix, right, replaced a Skrull, and then got killed on the moon and the Jean Grey that came back to life wasn’t the real Jean Grey but a Skrull Jean Grey? But please don’t forget that when that Jean Grey turned out not to be dead, Cyclops was married to Madelyn Prior who was a CLONE of Jean Grey, unless of course at some point Madelyn Prior was replaced by a FUCKING SKRULL!
And here’s what I’m saying. Even if Bendis and Quesada have it all worked out and written down and totally do know who’s a Skrull and who isn’t and when they were and when they weren’t, which by the way I don’t think those two duffuses (duffai?) do, NO OTHER WRITER OR READER FROM HERE ON IN will be able to remember. Just like the fucking Spiderclone saga. At some point if there’s anyone left who cares at all, they will just have to pretend the whole damn thing never happened.
But maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s just too complicated for my poor old brain to follow. Maybe it’s all going to be perfectly understandable at the end and I will have been complaining about nothing.
Or maybe it’s a big, damn, lazy ass mess of really, really bad writing.
Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)