Level of Marvel familiarity: Basic

Let's see if I get this right - The Young Avengers are the only ones protecting New York City and getting their asses handed to them in the process. Tony Stark's butler is kicking ass as well but not in the way the heroes would like. Meanwhile in the Savage Land, Iron Man takes a time out to try and cure him self while Spiderwoman, who is a Skrull, sticks her tongue in his mouth. Oh and a bunch of characters I don't know, but can only assume are the new generation of heroes who are coming up through the ranks after the "Civil War", are called to duty.

As any reader of PK knows I am not the biggest Marvel fan. This fact made some of the plot twists and fast pacing on issue 3 a little hard to follow but overall I dug the issue for its grandeur, if nothing else. In fact my only real complaint about the issue was the speed at which the focus flopped around. Just as I started to get what was happening things would suddenly change locations and characters.

And how about the images that closes out the book? As someone who not only once worked in a building on the New York City block depicted but who was in the city on September 11th I couldn't help but draw an eerie comparison to the devastation the city felt that day. Something tells me that Bendis has shaken up Marvel in a way that will be felt throughout all the titles for a very long time.

Folks with a passing knowledge of the Marvel universe would probably be better off picking up 'Secret Invasion' when it's inevitable trade paperback is published but true fans should be very excited about this vast team-up.

Buy it.

Level of Marvel familiarity: Expert

Bendis, I thought you were quitting that decompressed storytelling shtick. You were getting better, more concise. Then SI #3 comes out and it's a whole lot of treading water. Instead of focusing on one storyline and moving it to the next step, we get bits from every storyline and take a half step in one direction. In all honesty, I would much prefer to look in on one aspect per issue and take real strides, but I suppose it's easy to fall into this sort of trap when you're dealing with suck a huge story and so many characters.

So let's take a look at what does happen in the issue. The Skrull Queen tries to convince Tony Stark that he's a sleeper agent and was the crux of the entire invasion. Norman Osborn invites Captain Mar-Vell to a nice sit down. Jarvis takes down the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. And fighting. Lots and lots of fighting. And that's the weak point of the issue. It's not that Yu can't draw a good action scene, it's that I don't care about the action scene. In a book like this, it's all about story. The invasion is what's getting people pumped up. Finding out who is a Skrull and for how long, that's the hook. The Young Avengers fighting the Super Skrulls in Times Square is fine, but it isn't what we're here for (not to mention it was a little too similar to the end of the Young Avengers series).

The other snippets seem to just be tying in the satellite books, showing Mar-Vell at Thunderbolts mountain and Jarvis on the Helicarrier. I have no real problem with these as they're only a few pages total and they fill in gaps that will be important later. Since not everyone is reading all of the tie-ins, scenes like these are required to pop up in the main book. They may seem redundant to those of us reading New Avengers and Thunderbolts, but there is a large enough portion of the audience who is just reading the eight issue SI series. The scenes with Spider-Woman/the Skrull Queen are the heart of the issue. She takes out Echo who we find out is not a Skrull (which is obvious since she basically outed the invasion with Elektra) and tells Iron Man he's a sleeper agent. I don't think he really is a Skrull, I think she's just trying to mess with him. It works, but making Tony a Skrull is too much of a giveaway to explain his behavior from Civil War forward. He's made real progress as a character and Skrullifying him now wold undo that.

The final splash page featuring the return of Nick Fury is a welcome one, even if it is the only real reveal or move forward. His gun is ridiculously huge, but I'll forgive it. It's a neat little spread and I do quite enjoy that Fury makes his return by blasting a hole through a Skrull's chest in the middle of Times Square. He could have showed up a few minutes earlier and spared the Vision a shot to the head, but I guess there was traffic on the Cross Bronx. Wonder how that will play out in SI: Runaways/Young Avengers.

On the whole, it isn't a bad issue really, it's just one that could have been better. Make the Times Square battle another window scene like Jarvis or the Thunderbolts. Show some more infiltration scenes and you can still save Fury for the big reveal. But shoehorning in this action sequence to take up most of the book is changing the spirit of the book so far and it's more than a little jarring. I'm still digging the Secret Invasion crossover as a whole, but this issue left me a little cold. Great job on the subterfuge scenes, just give us more of them from here on out.

BUY IT

Level of Marvel familiarity: Moderately High

I was debating the ramifications of the potential reveal in this issue when I realized that that particular scene was the only really effective moment for me in the entire issue. Everything else was the equivalent of white noise. Even the ending was a big letdown, as we had already seen this building up elsewhere. Maybe my expectations were too high for the overall issue because after a solid two issue run that felt incredibly epic, it was disappointing to fall back down from that high. The ish was all set up for the aforementioned pivotal scene.

And let's talk about that scene for a moment. *SPOILER ALERTS LOCKED ON AND ENGAGED* If Tony is indeed a Skrull, as Spider-Woman implies, then that would make Civil War lose a lot of its meaning. If Civil War was just a ruse planned by the Skrulls the whole time we lose the whole anti and pro-registration debate, which had been treated in a very intelligent way. On the other hand, the other part of me is a little in awe of Bendis if he had planned this whole thing because it would fit into a lot of things. So I'm back to debating the merits of this situation. Now if Tony was not a Skrull, and Spider-Woman was just saying it confuse him, then well done! It certainly has us questioning his character and his actions.

Because of all the white noise in this issue, I'm not going to rate this as a Buy It. But because of the importance and the impact of the Tony scene, this gets at most a Read It.

Read It