Secret Invasion: “The Marvel Universe will not be the same.”

Entertainment Weekly has “an exclusive early peek” at Secret Invasion #1, the first issue in a summer mini-series from Marvel Comics. The series, which will run for eight issues, three of which might actually come out on time, is set to depict the payoff to a storyline that writer Brian Michael Bendis has been spinning for years. The Skrulls, a race of extraterrestrial shape-shifting bad-asses who have been kicking around the Marvel Universe since 1962’s Fantastic Four #2, have apparently infiltrated every corner of the Earth’s infrastructure and, now that they’ve been found out by the super-team the Avengers, they’re ready to announce their intentions to the world.

In an interview with EW’s Nisha Gopalan, Bendis promises that, when Secret Invasion ends, “[t]he Marvel Universe will not be the same.” Gopalan counters, “That’s what everyone says about an event comic!” To which Bendis replies:

Well, we’ve proven over time that House of M, Civil War, Secret War — none of these did leave the universe the way it was. The criticism going into Civil War is that it’s going to be a draw: Captain America’s dead and Tony Stark is running the world. That wasn’t the way it was when we started. These are big things for the characters. So on that note, we can only stand by our track record.

And y’know what? Their track record lately has been good, despite what the peanut gallery over on the Newsarama forums would have you believe. In the past few years, when Marvel has promised big change, they have delivered (for better or worse). Cap is dead, Iron Man is ruling the world, the mutant population is down to a little bit less than 200 worldwide, and Spider-Man isn’t married anymore (but he isn’t divorced, and he isn’t a widower; his marriage just never happened, thanks to Mephisto).

This is one comic that I won’t be missing, because I can’t wait to see if Marvel has the balls to keep shaking things up. And you, even if you’re a casual comics fan, should not miss it either. Marvel makes nearly every mini-series it puts out a self-contained affair (they’re always looking to pull in new readers, of course, plus they’re trying to think ahead to the eventual trade paperback release), so you should be able to jump on board even if you haven’t read anything in a while.

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The Amazingly Sh*tty Spider-Artist

I’d like to begin by giving my good pal Andy a shout-out for the shout-out he gave Geek Force Five on his site last week. And I’d like to follow-up that shout-out by thanking Andy for inadvertently reminding me that the comics coverage of this site has been woefully inadequate thus far. You see, in describing what I was covering over here, Andy specifically mentioned “comic book movies” instead of just plain comic books. That got me looking back into the archives to see what might have given him that impression. And, lo and behold, I discovered that the only comic book story I’ve done prior to this one was the one about the forthcoming Wolverine and Hulk movies. Add to that the fact that I used a movie-version of Spidey in the header image, and you can see why people might be confused.

So, without further ado, here is my attempt to get the comics coverage on this site back on track. Next week, I hope to get you an Explaining the Obsession entry similar to the one I did for Nine Inch Nails. Until then, here are my thoughts on this week’s issue of The Amazing Spider-Man:

The art sucks!

The gist of my feelings about the now thrice-monthly Spider-Man title is that Marvel is sacrificing quality for quantity. I was behind them 100% when they decided to cancel their excess Spidey titles and start publishing only one book that would have a more cohesive storyline. In the past, you had Spidey dealing with one crisis in Spectacular Spider-Man, one crisis in the adjectiveless Spider-Man, and another crisis in Amazing. And then, every once in a while, they’d do some sort of line-wide crossover and you’d have to buy all three when you hadn’t been buying all three before. It was confusing, even more confusing than this paragraph, if you can imagine that. The new strategy of publishing one title, Amazing Spider-Man, three times a month, was supposed to solve problems. And, for the first two months, it did.

But the problem now is that they’ve cycled through their top-tier artist and writer combos and we’re left with Bob Gale of Back to the Future fame doing the writing and this guy Phil Jimenez, who apparently couldn’t draw a realistic-looking foot to save his life. I mean, the art is just shoddy. Maybe this guy has done some quality work in the past, but what he’s doing now is just not doing it for me.

I started collecting comics in the 90s, when art was the major selling point. Now, I’m not saying that art should be the major selling point, and I’ll be the first to admit that the writing in the 90s left a lot to be desired, but I can’t stand books that try to win customers over with good writing alone. Comic books are about the marriage of art and words. You can’t skimp on one or the other, in my opinion. And that’s what I feel like Marvel is doing. They want to capitalize on Spidey’s popularity by having a new Spidey book out in stores three weeks out of every month, but they’re losing so much in the process.

Maybe next week will be better, but I’m not holding out much hope.

This Week’s Other Book(s)
This week’s Uncannny X-men (#496) was a surprise of the far nicer variety. Ed Brubaker’s spinning a couple of fun yarns here, one involving Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler bar-fighting in Russia near where Colossus comes from, and the other involving Cyclops and Emma Frost traveling to San Francisco to rescue some friends from a city that’s suddenly psychically under the impression that it’s the 1960s again. Fun, fun stuff. The mutants have been through some dark days in the past year or so, and this story arc seems to be all about balancing that.

I also managed to snag a copy of Secret Invasion Saga, a freebie book/marketing device designed to pull people in for Marvel’s big Secret Invasion event this summer. That was mildly entertaining, too. I loves me some skrulls, man. And I’m really excited to see what they do with this whole storyline. Basically, these shapeshifting aliens have infiltrated every facet of the Marvel Universe’s Earth. And everyone’s flipping out, because no one knows who’s who anymore.

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