Grant Morrison and Mark Millar will help save comics. But first, they’ll cowrite a book that, at the time, will represent an island in a sea of submediocrity and chaos. Spider-Man was all clones, all the time. The X-universe was in an Age of Apocalypse that was confusing and impossible to read if you didn’t read EVERYTHING associated with it. Punisher was everywhere and was easy to read but was the same thing over and over.
And then Morrison and Millar went all the way back to the best comics Marvel ever produced–the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four–and plucked back the skrulls who were turned into cows in FF #2–and delivered something crazy and offbeat. Skrull Kill Krew was a wild and wonderful ride on the “Marvel Edge” imprint label..
The story started in Mrs. O’Leary’s History class…
In a scene that these days could be quite triggering, some thugs bust in and kill the teacher. Only, she ain’t no normal teacher…
She’s a skrull. (And don’t you love that line, “Maybe it’s all mutants with you kids nowadays”?)
It turns out that they infiltrated the town where the cows lived (we saw this in Fantastic Four Annual #18 as well), only there it was the milk that transformed people. Now, it’s the beef.
The Kill Krew are a small group who have decided to eradicate the skrull threat but they, too, are infected and have adaptation powers. The hunts are shown in wonderfully Morrison-ish scenes like this:
It’s easy to see the roots of Secret Invasion here.
In the Marvel 616, they used Hydra (because at the time they didn’t have the rights to Fantastic Four) as the great infiltrators of American society. And Hydra figure in to this tale, too. The details don’t matter (and they’re far-fetched, again in deliciously Morrison fashion), but what DOES matter is that Baron Von Stucker got his cigarette holder from Hitler himself.
And where there is Hydra and Strucker, there’s also Cap.
That’s just classic.
When the Krew attack a skrull who is disguised as a foreign leader, Cap tries to stop them.
The Krew tell Cap to wake up and realize that all is not as it seems and America isn’t as pure as he thought it was. Cap gets his feelings hurt and goes and tells Nick Fury, who reveals that he knows all about the Krew.
Meanwhile, the Hydra connection gets exposed and the Krew goes after them, too.
And for the last two issues, the Krew take on four skrulls who have the powers of the Fantastic Four.
It’s a good “action ending.”
The Krew kill them and all the other skrulls, and we get a “happily ever after” ending. Here’s the final panels…
The Krew won’t be seen again until after the turn of the century because, I’m assuming, Marvel had no desire to publish something interesting and edgy on the “Marvel Edge” imprint and instead was content to churn out tripe and shit during the mid-’90s. Yeah, I’m a little bitter. Reading all the boots from 1993-199? is really hard. When I come upon something like this, I’m reminded of why I started this blog and I’m missing the decades that preceded this one.