Secret Invasion [Paperback]

Ever since Brian Michael Bendis first took the reigns on the Avengers franchise, he's been building to this story. The Skrulls, a race of shape-shifting aliens, have among them a religious sect that believes the Earth was created for them by their god. They have slowly infiltrated Earth, replacing a relatively small number of key individuals using new technology and techniques that render them undetectable to humans. The infiltration was revealed to the heroes before this series started, and they didn't take the news well. As of the first page of this collected edition, the two Avengers teams have very little trust for their teammates, and even less for the other teams. Spider-Woman is the only Avenger who trusts people on both teams, and even that trust is limited. (This could be due, in some degree, to the fact that it's usually Reed Richards and the rest of the Fantastic Four that have deterred Skrull operations in the past.)

This collection is almost devoid of the set-up. Rather, the eight issue "Secret Invasion" miniseries it collects serves as the culmination of five years of planning and plotting. If you want answers to the whys and hows of the invasion, you'll need to pick up the tie-ins collected in New Avengers, Vol. 8: Secret Invasion, Book 1 (v. 8, Bk. 1), Secret Invasion, Book 2 (New Avengers, Vol. 9) (v. 9, Bk. 2), Mighty Avengers, Vol. 3: Secret Invasion, Book 1 (v. 3) and Mighty Avengers Vol. 4: Secret Invasion, Book 2 (v. 4, Bk. 2). What you'll find here is the fight that settles the matter with as much finality as battles can settle anything.

Your opinion of this volume will likely depend on your familiarity with recent Avengers history and what you're looking for. If you want to see the developments that led to the invasion, you'll need to pick up all volumes of New Avengers and Mighty Avengers, as well as the Avengers Disassembled, House of M (Marvel Comics), Secret War (New Avengers) (singular, not plural) and Civil War volumes. If you want to know how the invasion and infiltration was accomplished, you'll need the New and Mighty Avengers volumes I have already linked to. If you're looking for a great big fight, including a huge number of Marvel heroes and villains, then you're in the right place. Bendis' scripts are adeptly illustrated by Leinil Yu (pencils), Mark Morales (inks) and Laura Martin (colours), but that's as far as this goes. The fight is very well done, and there are a few surprises and thoroughly enjoyable moments scattered within, but without the buildup, it's a whole lot of meaningless combat. It never promised to be more, which is good, because that's not what it delivers.

I have been anxiously following the build up to this story for years, as have many others. I have previously enjoyed Bendis' work on House of M, New Avengers, and many others. But this book is a gigantic flop.

The first problem is the pacing. The beginning of the book drags as far too much time is spent in the Savage Land. Then the back half of the book is rushed to the point where the final confrontation is just brief afterthought. It's almost as if the authors got through half the issues and then realized they were running out of pages with which to wrap up the story!

Indeed, it seems as if this final phase of the Secret Invasion is resolved over the course of 24 hours (Marvel U time), when readers have been following the build-up over the course of several years! How much richer could this book have been if the whole thing wasn't tidily resolved with 4 pages of illustrations featuring every character Yu could squeeze on a page simply shaking their fists and glaring at each other?

The second problem is the way the characters are used. There is virtually no invention or creativity in terms of the way the characters interact, either dramatically or when the fight scenes and battles take place. The witty banter is rehashed and too drawn-out, and worse, the fights are just "scenes" in which one or two panels of a lot of characters posing stands in for a sequential illustration of a true battle.

The book is full of nonsensical plot elements. For example, early in the story a spaceship full of Skrulls impersonating a gaggle of superheroes (some dead? some duplicates of the living? some older versions of the living/dead?) crashes to earth in the Savage Land, and our present-day heroes investigate. This episode dominated the first half of the book, but the reader is left mystified as to the point. It isn't even clear what the motivation of the Skrulls was in creating such a ship full of obvious impersonators.

Another mess is the confusing existence one group of Skrulls who are apparently brainwashed into thinking they actually ARE the people they are supposed to be impersonating, vs. the other group who are simply made to LOOK like the ones who they are impersonating. The two different groups apparently have completely different characteristics, abilities, and methods of concealment/detection. It is impossible for the reader to tell the difference, however, and the differences seem to be arbitrary and constantly shifting and contradictory in any case. Finally, the plot mechanics of how the heroes at last detect and reveal/defeat the Skrulls is lazy and unconvincing, to say the least.

Bendis' biggest problem throughout this story is that nothing much happens, and what does happen, happens at the wrong pace. The narrative thrust gets completely bogged down in a series of "witty" interactions that ultimately are meaningless, alternated with the usual (and utterly boring) bragging, boasting, and threatening that simply rehash classic super-hero/villain blab fests. It seems hard to believe that this is the writer who gave us the cleverly plotted and inventive House of M.

Possibly most offensive of all, is the terrible work of the artist, Leinil Francis Yu. He indeed has a unique style, with an interesting use of line, and, looked at individually, his drawings might be considered good. However, he lacks any ability to tell a sequential story from panel to panel. Page after page is filled with repetitive pose-downs between heroes, or between heroes and villains. The battle scenes are simply a series of posters, processions of static images. The battles are not illustrated sequentially and logically. One of the biggest missed opportunities in this work is that we don't get any sense of the various characters' powers and abilities interacting with each other. The characters just pose and flex and execute their most basic moves in jumbled panels of frozen action. Eventually, the book becomes a procession of halfway decent cover art.

I will say that the individual Secret Invasion tie-ins, the issues involving the Secret Invasion story in New/Mighty Avengers and Ms. Marvel series, for example, were very well done, and are consistent with the basic problem that I and other reviewers note: effective build-up, lousy payoff. In fact, the issues of the Avengers written to tie in are a series of stories looking back at the past few years of Marvel History with an eye to showing how cleverly the Skrull invasion was plotted and carried out. It is clear that Bendis was more excited about revealing to readers his labyrinthine build-up to this story in the Avengers books than he was in actually executing the denouement in this Secret Invasion limited series.

Secret Invasion: The Infiltration is a pretty handy companion to Marvel's next big mega-event, but that being said, this is only worth picking up for those that have been out of the loop and are new to the proceedings. For those that don't know, it has become clear that the shape-shifting alien race known as the Skrulls have infiltrated the planet, and possibly every superhero team in the Marvel universe. Collecting the classic debut of the Skruls in a very early issue of Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as well as recent issues of Secret Invasion writer Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers, as well as the first and final issues of Bendis' New Avengers: Illuminati mini-series, Secret Invasion: The Infiltration provides readers with some solid past and more recent history that leads up to the event. The thing is, the issues collected here can already be found (or will be found soon) in other TPB collections, so if you already own any of them, this TPB isn't worth picking up unless you're a die-hard completest. Other than that though, Secret Invasion: The Infiltration is worth picking up for those that have been out of the loop or don't follow any of the aforementioned series', but that's it.

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