This week in Secret Invasion:
Secret Invasion #3

Secret Invasion #3 came out this week, with the much talked-about cover with Spider-Woman about to kiss Iron Man. The cover took on new meaning with the release of New Avengers #40, which revealed that Spider-Woman is a Skrull.

The issue opens with the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier floating in the ocean, and Commander Hill aptly noting that “this thing falls out of the sky every other Thursday.” At least someone’s acknowledging it. But Jarvis shows up to give her the option of surrendering to him. Hill has been beaten up pretty bad since taking the S.H.I.E.L.D. director position post Nick Fury, but I like that she’s being given the opportunity to prove herself somewhat. That hasn’t fully happened yet, but she’s written with an awareness and defiance that shows she’s not quite the stooge she was when she took the spot.

At Thunderbolts Mountain, Captain Marvel is blowing the joint up, but he can’t deliver a deathblow. Norman Osborn coolly confronts him by saying “You can’t do it, can you? And my guess is you’re not exactly who you’re dressed as.” In the Captain Marvel miniseries, Captain Marvel was revealed to be a Skrull whose mental conditioning was botched, leaving Mar-Vell’s personality intact in the Skrull body.

At Camp Hammond, the Initiative finds out they’re being led into the thick of the Super-Skrull attack on New York by order of Yellowjacket Hank Pym, who we learned was a Skrull back in Secret Invasion #1. Skrull Pym’s involvement in the Initiative is presumably just to keep tabs on as many of the super-powered people as possible. I would guess this is just an effort to lead unprepared heroes to the slaughter.

And slaughter is what it appears to be, as the Super Skrulls seem to be killing off the Young Avengers. They’re a little ambiguous about whether or not people are dying, but Young Avengers writer Chris Yost said in an interview that things get “really bad” for the Young Avengers thanks to Bendis in Secret Invasion #3. So I think some of them are dead. I don’t read Young Avengers, so I don’t care too much, but teenagers getting killed in a battle gave me some of that same feeling I had when reading Mutant Massacre for the first time.

Meanwhile, back in the Savage Land, Skrull Spider-Woman might have killed Echo. I’m not sure, but Spider-Woman seemed to have no problem compromising her secret Skrull identity to Echo, so she didn’t seem to think Echo is going to be a problem in the future after choking her and repeatedly zapping her in the chest.

She goes into Tony Stark’s makeshift lab, where he’s attempting to rebuild his armor after it was taken down — along with pretty much every other potentially useful computer on Earth — by a virus. At this point, Spider-Woman talks to Tony freely as a Skrull, but congratulates him — “Your work on Earth is done,” she tells him. “You will go down in our people’s history as the greatest soldier the Armada has ever had.” He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, though she’s trying to convince him he’s a Skrull. She says that’s what he was trained to think, telling him that he saved the Skrull people, turning the heroes against each other, positioning himself as the most important person in the world. “If not for you … this day would never have come.”

Back in New York, the carnage mounts as another of the kids gets killed and Vision’s head gets blown up to conclude his last act of attempted heroic defiance. The onlookers and the Skrulls get a sense of how decisive the Skrull victory is when the ground starts rumbling, a Skrull blows up, and Nick Fury and his new Howling Commandos show up.

I’ve never been a huge Nick Fury fan, but the restraint Marvel showed in keeping him gone for several years paid off — that was a sweet moment that totally redeemed the series from an otherwise fairly lackluster second issue. I’m very glad that Nick Fury’s return is happening now. He was obviously coming back, but by coming back in issue 3 of 8, it’s clear he’s going to be part of the ongoing resistance, rather than just the hero who runs in at the end to save the day.

Past Implications:
I’m guessing that Tony’s not a Skrull. His brain is a huge threat to the Skrulls, so they’re trying to neutralize it via confusion similar to what they’re doing with The Sentry — hence Spider-Woman’s decision to bring Skrull Elektra to Tony in the first place and kick off his paranoia.

But this Skrull ignorance isn’t unprecedented — in New Avengers #40, it is shown that the new Super Skrulls are basically tricked to believe that they are the real deal. And obviously with Captain Marvel, this type of Skrull identity confusion has already happened in the Invasion.

I will say that Tony being a Skrull but not realizing it is way more satisfying than Tony just having been a knowingly evil manipulator through all of this. He had gotten pretty unlikeable during Civil War, but I thought a good job was being done of building him back up as a hero lately.

I’m still thinking he’s not a Skrull. Skrull Jarvis said the Hulk situation and the Registraton Act happened without Skrull intervention in Mighty Avengers #14. But last issue he was boasting that the Skrulls can’t duplicate his brain, and now we know they can. That ignorance plays right into what Spider-Woman was talking about in terms of fully buying into what he was supposed to believe. And don’t forget that New Avengers #41 did tell us that there were two Skrulls on the team…

If Stark is a Skrull, I wonder if the switch could have happened when Hank Pym helped save him from the Ultron virus in the first Mighty Avengers arc.