This week in Secret Invasion:
Secret Invasion #2 and
Mighty Avengers #13

Two Secret Invasion books came out this week — Secret Invasion #2 and Mighty Avengers #13.

Secret Invasion #2 starts off in the Savage Land with the superheroes from the Skrull ship facing off against the combined New and Mighty Avengers. Both sides accuse the others of being Skrulls. Ares warns his teammates that it’s a trap, but no one listens to him. It seems reasonable, but in a situation like that, I’d imagine it’s hard to know who to listen to. Obviously, a fight breaks out.

Tony Stark is helpless, as his armor has completely failed thanks to the virus Jarvis unleashed in issue #1. Carol Danvers flies him out of the fight while everyone else attacks each other, taking on their counterpart when available.

The intrigue to the situation is obviously entertaining the thought of “What if these are all the originals, and the reason Clint Barton came back from the dead … and the White Queen turned good … and the Scarlet Witch turned bad … what if all those implausible things happened because the people we thought we knew had been replaced by Skrulls?” It’s where the intrigue of the Skrull invasion comes from, but unfortunately, it’s dampened to a degree when we see the shipwrecked Vision do a little shape-change to freak out The Sentry.

So right off, it’s made clear that some of this gang are Skrulls. The question then becomes how many of them are Skrulls, if not all of them.

Hawkeye / Ronin is pretty convinced that the shipwrecked Hawkeye is a Skrull. He snatches Skrull Hawkeye’s quiver and arrows and takes cover in the woods to start picking off Skrulls, but he second guesses his shooting when shipwrecked Captain America successfully uses his shield to deflect one of the arrows. Of course, nothing can stay too orderly in the Savage Land — not even a big gang fight — without a dinosaur coming to disrupt it.

Carol Danvers takes Tony to the Mutate Citadel, which is now in ruins but once held a laboratory. He’s hoping to rebuild his armor from scratch, saying “I’m going to do the one thing Skrulls can’t imitate. Use my brain.” Oh, but Tony — they can.

Back in the jungle, New Avenger Luke Cage and New Avenger Wolverine stumble upon Dead Skrull Spider-Man and then bicker a bit. Mockingbird is hovered over Dead Skrull Hawkeye, and Wolverine is about to help her join him when New Avenger Hawkeye / Ronin shoots him with an arrow to stop him.

Obviously, Mockingbird claims she’s not a Skrull. She says she’s an Avenger and an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and they’ve been stuck up in space for at least a year. Clint jumps down and demands that she tell him something about October 12th. She says that she had a miscarriage, and that would have been the baby’s birthday. She says “I should’a tested the Skrull Hawkeye with that one.”

He unmasks and kisses her, thinking his lost love is back from the dead. Wolverine cautions him, but Hawkeye says this is his call, and “There’s no way they would know what she just said. Nobody knows that.”

They bicker a little more over whether or not people are Skrulls, and then Mockingbird declares that the Captain America on the ship is the real Captain America for sure. “He’s the one that got us back to Earth,” she says.

In New York, Skrull ships descend on Manhattan. The Young Avengers are there, but these are some heavy duty superbad Super Skrulls, putting Human Torch, Thing, Thor, Captain America, Dr. Strange, Archangel, Cyclops, Wolverine and Colossus powers on display, to name a few.

Then over in Mighty Avengers #13, we see a tale from six months ago in which undercover Nick Fury enlists the help of Daily Johnson, seen previously in Secret War, to put together a new team of heroes. He had a “Caterpillar file” — files on some people with potential that he never shared with anyone — “Not S.H.I.E.L.D., not the President, not the C.I.A.,” thus essentially eliminating the possibility that Skrulls (or whoever else was behind this) would know about them.

The team includes Phobos, God of Fear — Ares’ 10-year-old son; Yo-Yo Rodriguez, a super speedster who gets slingshotted back to where she came from (and daughter of The Griffin); a guy named J.T., grandson of the original Ghost Rider, who can make chains burn; the son of Doctor Druid; and Jerry Sledge, who I guess is really strong.

Fury tells them that they do what he says, every day for the rest of their lives. “If you don’t, you’ll die … it’s not a threat, it’s a statistical fact … but the good news is … every day for the rest of your lives you are going to make the world better than the day it was before … every day … we’ll start with training … any of you know what a Skrull is?”

Both issues were pretty quick reads and fairly disappointing this week. I felt like out of two issues, I got one complete comic.

Past Implications:
There are several ways to look at the Mockingbird situation.

1. She’s telling the truth, and some of the people on that ship are who they really say they are. So far, we know Spider-Man wasn’t; Vision wasn’t; Hawkeye wasn’t.

2. She’s a Skrull. As we’ve seen, Skrulls can now be given the X-Men’s powers. That includes telepathy, courtesy of Professor X. The Avengers don’t know this yet. It would have been so very very easy to pluck that out of Clint’s mind.

3. He’s a Skrull, and it didn’t really matter what the answer was.

My vote is #2.

She’s a fibber. We obviously know that’s not the real Captain America, since Captain America didn’t turn into a Skrull when he died. And since the crash in the Savage Land was a diversion to keep the heroes out of New York, it’s not exactly a great endorsement to say “Oh yeah, I know that’s really Captain America, because he’s the one who created the diversion that allowed Super Skrulls to lay waste to Manhattan!”

Jessica Drew was feeding Hydra information on Fury’s “Caterpillar file” back in New Avengers #14.