Comics / Comic Reviews / Marvel Comics

Secret Invasion #5

By Hervé St-Louis
August 30, 2008 - 15:44

The super heroes regroup and find a way of determining who is a Skrull and who is not. Many Skrulls get killed this issue and it seems that the heroes will finally get rid of the invading aliens. Can anything go wrong now?

This will probably be the last issue of this series that I purchase. I already know how it will end and I should have seen it coming from the first issue and stop hoping there would be a twist or something to make this story anything but the standard stupid fake blockbuster that promises to change everything and changes nothing.

My main peeve -  the amount of Skrulls that die in comparison to the amount of heroes and humans that die. The Skrulls seem like an infinite fodder for stock characters getting killed and tricked even by minor D level characters. That’s not what I signed up for when I heard about the so-called "secret invasion". From the beginning, this mini-series has been nothing but a hollow shell with fake leads and subplots that eventually all ends at the same place – another Skrull gets killed.

If I wanted to see stupid one line characters getting killed every page, I would buy Marvel Zombies. Since Civil War, Marvel Comics was on a roll, producing comic books that I wanted to read. Now, they’ve gone too far. They’ve raised expectations and failed to deliver. I don’t want to see the Skrull die every moment. If this is a war, it’s hard for me to understand why one side always gets the shaft while the other one keeps winning every encounter. This is turning into the stock Hollywood movie where America can do no wrong and defeats all its enemies, even when it’s logically improbable.

If Marvel Comics and Brian Bendis think that Marvel Comics readers want to read their version of Die Hard then perhaps it’s time for me to make a quick exit and find something that will actually challenge me and not have the hero coming up on top at every turn. It’s too bad that Bendis could not rise above the status of a hack writer with hype behind his wings. It would have been enjoyable to read a more mixed conflict that is not so black and white with the evil green men trying to invade the planet and the valiant humans pushing them back.

Even the way Bendis characterizes the Skrull culture shows that he has less skills when it comes to create alien universe than say Joss Whedon. Whedon doesn’t just create an alien race. He creates a whole mythology, a whole different way of looking at a world and a people. Bendis unfortunately has no such skill or grace in his writing. It’s all clear cut. Hawkeye screaming at the end for revenge was the utmost cliché. Next issue he’ll be shooting down Skrulls by the dozen with some new gun or something. What I don’t understand is how the Skrulls who are supposed to have augmented powers continue to get killed by very basic weapons. All the foreshadowing and all the work done by Bendis done to show to what length the aliens have gone to succeed are in vain.

Looking at the cover, I only feel only one thing. Reading about the Skrull invasion is like reading about all those Fu Manchu comic books where the Japanese and Chinese were ugly little yellow aliens and how America had to beat them to a pulp. It almost feels racist to read anymore of this dreck. I don’t know who the Skrulls are standing for as America’s newest enemy, but I know I’m not signing on to this anymore.  

At this point, I don’t care about Yu’s anorexic characters that all look the same. He’s learned how to better pace his stories, but I still don’t care about his artwork. He’s part of why I don’t like this series and why I’m quitting this Secret Invasion thing. Now can we get back to real storytelling and stories that readers can't figure out how they will end after just reading the first issue?

Rating: 0 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12