Posts Tagged ‘ Secret Invasion ’

Back when Osborn first assembled his Cabal, before Namor and Emma Frost flipped him the bird, Doom and Loki started plotting behind his back, and the Hood lost his powers (or at least his first set), Osborn kept them all in line with a shadowy figure behind the door.

The secret of the man behind the door is apparently key to the end of Dark Reign – which makes some amount of sense, but would make even more if he’d appeared more than once in the whole shebang.

Anyway, over at Bleeding Cool, Rich Johnston claims to have the scoop on his identity, and when check out the solicit for Dark Avengers #11 (and oddly, Dark Avengers #12 has the exact same solicit), alarm bells start ringing:

The Dark Avengers are pitted against a foe they cannot defeat: A man with the power over every molecule in the world!

Molecule, you say? MM, Rich Johnston says?

Could Owen Reese the Molecule Man be the power behind the throne?

If so, the last we heard of him, he was being busted out of the Raft (which may be less secure than Arkham Asylum) at the start of Secret Invasion…

…and its not like Bendis doesn’t love plotting stuff a while in advance.

If it is the Molecule Man, it begs the question of what could defeat him; after all, this is a guy who took on the Beyonder (indeed, I think he actually created the Beyonder if I’m remembering my Secret Wars III correctly), and this was back before Bendis ham-handedly attempted to retcon the Beyonder into being an Inhuman, which I can easily dismiss as a fever dream.

So if Owen Reese has gone back to his evil ways and regained his powers, how are you going to calm him down?

Easy. Bring in his squeeze, Volcana.

Owen does love his Marsha-Mallow, and then Dark Reign would, basically be ended by love. And puppies and rainbows for all!

Yeah, I was irked.

And then he goes and writes two simple pages like this in this week’s Mighty Avengers:

I mean, dammit Bendis, you can’t even let me stay pissed, can you?

So I wasn’t 100% on the money with my post-Secret Invasion predictions but I was pretty damn close.

…not Mockingbird sacrificing herself to save her husband and teammates?

…well, okay then…

Sigh. I’m such a softy.

But I really wanted Clint to answer ‘Donna Karan’.

I wonder – could Clint reclaim ‘Hawkeye’ and Echo reclaim the ‘Ronin’ identity?

Please?

Right there, in the middle of the returnees (the real returnees, not those fake returnees), was the very last person I was expecting to see…

Elvis has re-entered the building!

Awesome!

It’s busy here at CBC Central and between an impending Christmas and lots of work deadlines, I’m a little bit snowed.

That’s why you’ve had these Black Lantern things the last day or two.

Even so, not even I can pull something from nothing, so unless something lets up this is all you’re getting today.

To make matters worse, I’m out tonight which means that I’ll probably only be on top of one comic by the time tomorrow comes – although that one will be Secret Invasion #8 which I’ve already spoiled for myself…

Anyway, be back tomorrow!

Zatanna by Mark Brooks

I can’t say how much I enjoyed Secret Invasion Inhumans – it really seemed to raise the Inhumans up to major players in the Marvel U – and showed the normally nonentity Black Bolt to be a real bad ass…

I’m not sure why I don’t like the Eternals too much as a concept but am so fond of the Inhumans – it must just be the characters. More than anything, I think this miniseries has solidified them as a family and as rulers of their people. It also dates back to Crystal’s time with both the FF and the Avengers. I’ve always liked the character, and to see her actually standing up for herself and her family is pretty satisfying.

I’m looking forward to War of Kings now…dammit…

Back to that potential Mighty Avengers line-up…you know the one:

In light of what I said last post, and that several people pointed this out to me, and that Bendis said he was going to be one of the Avengers teams, I’m going to call that gun-wielding guy on the bottom left not as Hank Pym, but as Noh-Varr, the new Captain Marvel.

Also, you may remember that Slott said that there will be a founding member on the team – but the absence of Pym (sniff) still leaves Iron Man and Hulk on that pic above.

Or does it?

The image below appeared on Mike Deodato’s blog a few days ago, and Bendis had hinted at the appearance of a character by this name –

– so it could be him and not Iron Man, although Mike Deodato is the artist on Dark Avengers and not Mighty, so maybe not.

It could still be War Machine on the Mighty Avengers cover with the shoulder cannons down. Yep, I’m going for that, because I really, really, hope that’s the Hulk on that cover above and not Hulking, so he’s the only founder.

You know how there’s a Secret Invasion: Requiem issue being solicited with no hint as to who’s being mourned?

…rampant speculation and possible SPOILERS below (well, if my random speculation is right)…

In the latest post-Secret Invasion issue of Ms Marvel, we end with the out of the blue realization by Carol Danvers of what she needs to do next:

Then in this week’s issue of Deadpool, the crazy merc’s data about how to kill the Skrull Queen doesn’t reach intended recipient Nick Fury because it’s hijacked by…Norman Osborn.

And then there’s this preview of an upcoming Moon Knight.

Uh, what was that again?

Is that a SHIELD agent about to address Osborn as ‘Director’?

Now granted, he could be referring to him in his capacity of Director of the Thunderbolts, and I’m not even sure if Moon Knight is set after the invasion or not, but I was linking some dots here

We know thanks to this that there will be casualties at the end of Secret Invasion. And we know that Nick Fury will still have his Secret Warriors at the end of the war – and from the sound of it they’ll still be secret, which suggests to me that Fury may still be underground and not SHIELD leader.

It’s pretty much a given that Iron Man won’t be Director following the war too, what with his Iron Man, Director of SHIELD book being cancelled in favor of Invincible Iron Man.

I think Norman Osborn will be filling the position. And I think he’ll be doing some double dealing that costs a lot of lives to get there – but maybe only certain people, such as, say Ms Marvel, will know what went down.

That would certainly tie in with new Thunderbolts writer Andy Diggle saying that the book will be taking some new directions, especially if they end up being a SHIELD black ops unit with international reach.

So. Norman Osborn, Director of SHIELD. What do you think?

Poor old Jim Rhodes.

At one point Iron Man’s pilot, Rhodey’s been bounced from pillar to post for years.

He becomes Iron Man, only to have Tony’s armor screw with his mind.

He hangs around with Tony only in his tighty-whiteys way too much. Way too much.

He becomes War Machine when Tony dies, only to have Tony not be dead at all, just screwing with his mind.

He strikes out on his own and joins up with the Avengers West Coast only to have them disbanded and reformed by Tony as Force Works. Only Rhodey doesn’t get an invite.

He gets rid of the armor only to get bonded to a weird alien-parasite-thingummy armor.

He somehow gets rid of that armor and eventually ends up in The Crew. Which gets cancelled after, like, two issues.

He ends up working for Office of National Emergency (O.N.E.) in a big old Sentinel armor, then gets smacked around by Black Panther and Storm. Panther gives him a lecture then buggers off.

He then ends up as some kind of unexplainedly cyborg thing back in an armor that looks like his old one as an instructor at the Initiative, where he doesn’t get to do much except snarl at people through his faceplate.

And then, finally, Tony uses him as a failsafe against the Skrulls because he built the new armor out of old tech ‘just in case’.

On the plus side, he just got hooked up to a giant space station and transformed it into a giant kick-ass transforming robot thing.

So, y’know, upside.

Oh, also, to the joy of exactly one person (me), Christos Gage bought back Cybermancer!

Cover at the top via IGN

You know, Hank Pym’s a bit of a douche.

Look at the evidence. He falls in love with a pretty young socialite (apparently when she’s very young) who just happens to look like his dead/ex/spy/monster wife.

When her father’s murdered and young Janet Van Dyne decides to join the ant-powered Pym on his scientific adventures, he naturally straps her to a contraption to give her super-powers. Later on, he’d unexpectedly up her powers by giving her a ‘sting’ without telling her then later on he’d mutate her into a Wasp-like creature to save her life (but we don’t talk about that).

Long after, after three costumed identities, co-founding the Avengers and years of neglecting jan in favor of his lab, the repressed Pym has a schizophrenic break and marries her while pretending to be the man who killed Pym.

And Jan goes along with it. No saint herself, that one.

Ah, the Silver Age! (Yes I know that this has been revisted in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in an attempt to make it a bit more…realistic is too strong a word, but I’m going with the original intent here.)

Along the way in those years, Pym managed to create Ultron a maniacal killer robot with a father fixation. He also felt constantly overshadowed by the other Avengers, believing himself useless.

That led to a downward spiral where he had anothe semi-psychotic episode, creating another robot to attack the Avengers just so he could save the day.

And then there was the back-hander that has defined Pym ever since in the mind of readers and writers alike. During this semi-psychotic break, he slapped his wife when she tried to stop him, sending her flying across the room.

Pym hit rock bottom pretty soon after. Fired from the Avengers, he was soon framed by Egghead and imprisoned, although he was eventually cleared of the charges against him. After that, he retired from superheroics – only to be drawn back in to look after the West Coast Avengers’ compound by Hawkeye.

Of course, Hank still had issues…

…although he was persuaded not to commit suicide by part time Avenger Espirita. He stuck around with the Whackos, being studly with Espirita and Tigra before reuniting with Jan. The pair later ended up on the main team with Hank resuming his Giant-Man role (and, later Goliath) before being split into two people – meek, scientific Goliath and brash, reckless Yellowjacket.

They were eventually reintegrated, and Pym continued as Yellowjacket. Back with Jan, he indulged in quite a bit of kinky sex before she decided to uncharacteristically shag Hawkeye behind Hank’s back.

Shortly after, the Avengers Disassembled and Hank and Jan left for England where she drank a lot and he got involved with a pretty young thing who turned out to be a Skrull sent to replace him.

And that’s all she wrote. We still don’t know what happened to the real Hank…but thanks to this week’s Mighty Avengers we do know what happened to the Skrull who replaced him…

…he thought that the Skrulls would lose the war because Hank Pym’s mind started to overwrite his. Dugan-Skrull of course thought he was just absorbing Pym’s batshit crazy complexes, but I have another theory.
I think that Pym’s a bit of a dick, by and large. He’s flawed, arrogant and generally a bit of an idiot despite being massively intelligent.

The thing is, his heroicness, his thinking the best of people, his smartness and willingness to defend people actually overwrote Skrull programming. His thoughts actually came to matter to the Skrull.

And he wasn’t the first…

It sounds like the Pym Skrull has been replaced more than once – so he has this effect on all of them. It doesn’t sound like this has happened to the other Skrulls, Mar-Vell aside, and I like that.

I like that Pym’s a hero in spite of his flaws. Yes, he’s got problems. Yes, he’s got a past that he regrets. Yes, he screws up.

But in spite of all of that, he’s a hero and that heroic nature even shines through the Skrull sent to replace him. That might not be how Bendis intended, but it’s what I’m taking away. Hank Pym is still one of my favorite characters…

…now I just hope he’s still alive somewhere.

Another image has been released from the X-Men Noir project. It’s interesting that this project – which I assume is basically a big What If..? is being marketed like this.

Oh, you know he does.

I posted a few items earlier this week that I need to go back and comment on thanks to a couple of things that have come up in the last day or two…and here’s the first

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or simply don’t read Marvel in which case this’ll be of no interest to you), you’ll know that one of the Skrull infiltrators (and the Empress herself) in Marvel’s Secret Invasion is none other than Spider-Woman. Apparently this is part of Bendis’ long term plan…

…and I’m calling bullshit if he’s saying that because it doesn’t really gel with a lot of what Marvel and Bendis did.

Back when New Avengers kicked off, Wolverine (skulking in the Savage Land because a more convenient plot device to drag him into the group wasn’t around, apparently) attacked Spider-Woman because he ‘didn’t recognize’ her scent – which would be pretty unlikely because he’d worked with her a lot before. Of course, that points towards Skrullishness – except for the fact that as we’ve heard ad infinitum, Wolverine can’t tell Skrulls apart from who they impersonate by their scent. A more obvious reason would be that Jessica’s scent has been altered by whatever it was Hydra did to give her her powers back.

Or that Wolverine’s an idiot.

In the ‘reveal’ issue of New Avengers, the Skrulls pointed out to their Empress that Spider-Woman was ideally suited to being replaced. Well, not if she wasn’t a member of the Avengers she wasn’t, because she was doing sod all for years before that. Yet apparently she’s the ideal sleeper. This was pretty much intimated to being early on in the infiltration as well.

In Giant Size Spider-Woman, not only was her ‘re-origin’ story narrated by her (and clearly, actually the ‘real’ her not a Skrull impersonator) but she was clearly without powers – they were returned to her by Hydra. This was followed pretty soon after by another New Avengers arc where her role as a Hydra-SHIELD double agent (or possibly triple, can’t remember) was outlined. It was also in this story where the team held a press conference to introduce themselves.

That scene was revisited in a recent Secret Invasion crossover where Jarvis-Skrull accessed files on the Sentry to see how they could take him off the playing field. This is followed by a meeting with a number of Skrulls including Spider-Woman…but it doesn’t make any sense that she was really planned as a Skrull at this point unless she was replaced between pages of these issues.

Then there’s the big push that Marvel gave Spider-Woman when New Avengers was a hit, with a Spider-Woman: Origins mini and an announced Bendis-Maleev ongoing series. That ongoing was delayed allegedly as a result of Civil War but it now appears that it was because it was decided that Spider-Woman was a Skrull. That doesn’t quite tie in with her CW tie-in spotlight issue of New Avengers either, though – unless she was replaced after that, which then doesn’t tie in with the infiltration timeline.

I just think that when you really think through this whole thing, it seems very unlikely that Spider-Woman was planned as a Skrull from the beginning…simply because the ‘clues’ don’t add up.

Unless…

…unless it was planned from the beginning that Spider-Woman would be targeted for replacement as a Skrull – and any Skrully aspects, claims or games that she’s laying claim to are actually because she beat the crap out of the Skrull princess and isn’t sure who else to trust. That could, in theory, explain why she was affected by Dr Strange’s ‘find the duplicitous’ one spell.

And then, when she realised that none of the other New Avengers were Skrulls, she hightailed it over to the Mighty team because she figured there had to be some Skrulls on the team over there.

Eh, it’s a theory and it’s probably wrong – but if it turns out that she really is a Skrull, and if she is I won’t believe it till I see her wrinkly green chin, all I’m saying is that this wasn’t planned all along.

So…Iron Man is out and if rumor is to be believed it might be worth sticking around past the credits for a scene I blogged about ages ago.

Meanwhile in the regular Marvel U, good ol’ Nick Fury is in his classic non-ultimate iteration… except for his appearance in next week’s Mighty Avengers #13…
Oh Bendis, you card.

You just put that in so everyone would have a laugh at how clever it is, didn’t you? So you’d be able to say, maybe Nick Fury could be black like Ultimate Nick…

I mean, it worked with Mach I over in Thunderbolts, right? And the X-Men have all those image transducers, right?

So why not?

Well for my part because I kind of like original Nick’s look. I like Fury in the Ultiverse (or wherever he ended up), but he’s a very separate and different character than the Nick Fury that served in WWII in the Marvel U and has been around for 40+ years of publishing.

Plus, like Daisy says…worst disguise ever.

What do you think? Do you want Nick to go down the Samuel L Jackson route or do you prefer the classic look?