Written by Roy Thomas
Art by Sal Buscema, Neal Adams and John Buscema
Trade Paperback form Marvel Comics
*The Avengers: The Kree-Skrull War* collects in trade paperback a story that for many represents one of those key moments in the Marvel Universe that continuity hinges around. Examples are the creation of the Fantastic Four (the official beginning of current Marvel history, always eight of so years in the past) and Captain America's resurrection from a block of ice. Continuity can be "ret-conned" (retroactively changed) from book to book, but these elements remain cast in stone. It's occurred to me that Marvel Continuity is not unlike Catholic Truth, which I learned in school is Developmental, Historical and Hierarchical, shorthand for "Truth changes over time, but some Truths are more important and unchanging than others." We can bicker about how many times Tony Stark has fallen off the wagon or whether the Hulk was a mutant before he was irradiated, but there's no denying that Bruce Banner saved Rick Jones from the gamma blast and threw himself before the rays.
And at some point a few years ago, So It Is Written, the Avengers saved Earth from annihilation by flying off to the Andromeda Galaxy and taking part in a war between the Kree and the Skrulls. It's a major point, in fact, in Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's *Marvels,* that the Avengers' disappearance from Earth for what seemed like months shook the people's faith in the super-hero community.
So it's interesting to finally *read* *The Kree-Skrull War* and see what all the fuss was about. The story, which played out in *Avengers* #89-97 in 1971 and 1972, takes a good long time to get started, so there's little sense of urgency in Roy Thomas' script early on. We start with Captain Marvel, or Mar-vell the Kree, coming to Earth in flight from the Skrulls.
We learn a little about the two alien races. The Kree are a paternalistic, arrogant race of highly advanced beings who jump-started the early men who would become the Inhumans and now consider Earth to be a threat to their dominance-- someday, not right now. Right now we're sort of a distant early warning, even with all the Super-powered folks on our planet. The Skrulls are shape-shifting lizard-like people who receive far less respect than the Kree, although they're really no more evil. The two races hate one another, and each is now under the leadership of an usurper who urges war.
The clever concept behind *The Kree-Skrull War* is that Earth is only endangered because it lies in contested space at an equidistant point between the Kree's and Skrulls' respective Homeworlds. The humans there are just in the way. The Kree would like to unleash a giant radiation wave that would send Earth back to the Stone Age, while the Skrulls would prefer a more Grand-Moff-Tarkin approach, as it were. In the early parts of the story, the Avengers are in their own element on Earth, trying to aid their ally, the disgraced Kree Captain Marvel. By the end, when they're whisked away to the Kree's Andromeda Galaxy, they seem like * the Little Rascals*, totally dwarfed by the cosmic events and political infighting going on around them. The best the Avengers can do is join in one scrap after another.
I read *The Kree-Skrull War* and kept musing over how the event might be re-written if, say, Kurt Busiek did it today. Now that we've fed fat on endless mega-stories, such as the "Age of Apocalypse,* when we saw all the X-Men working in a huge guerilla war, the action in *The Kree-Skrull War* seems unfocused. Perhaps it should, since it may have been one of the first such larger arcs.
It's odd, reading this thirty-year-old story, to remember that Marvel was considered fairly avant-garde when it came along in the sixties, because of the more complicated home lives of the heroes and the twisting, soapy storylines. But Marvel was also known for bringing to its stories a cosmic grandeur, with plenty of beings from other dimensions and kaleidoscopic visions a la Steve Ditko's *Doctor Strange* work. Both more personal *and* more universal, Marvel Comics were the sophisticated choice.
In *The Kree-Skrull War*, Roy Thomas paints a picture of characters and a comic universe in transition between the Golden Age of simplicity and the Silver Age of "shades of gray." The focal point for this contrast is Rick Jones, a character whose youthful irresponsibility resulted in the horrible mutation of Bruce Banner. Here, Rick is a friend of Captain Marvel, and one of the few characters who doesn't sound a lot like the Golden-Agers Marvel was supposed to have replaced. Interesting, then, that Golden-Age fetishist Thomas has Rick save the very world by calling on his remembrances of the Marvel Heroes of Old, notably Captain America, Sub-Mariner and Human Torch of the Invaders.
Roy Thomas's most chilling creation is Senator Craddock, whose House Committee to reveal Aliens among America's most trusted citizens is modeled closely after Senator McCarthy's hearings. While Thomas has Vision refer to that most unfair process, "trial by television," the Avengers are called to testify and made to look strange and frightening. This is the best part of the story, and it's interesting to note that Roy Thomas had not yet seen such TV debacles as the character assassination of Atlanta non-bomber Richard Jewell.
Along the way there are also some wild, wonderful moments, such as the "Journey to the Center of the Android," in which Hank Pym, Ant-Man, has to stay alive as he dodges techno-antibodies to repair the Vision from inside.
But today, *The Kree-Skrull War* is way too dated to be anything more than an interesting primary text. Oh, that language. Thomas just can't help but go sailing over the top in every breathless panel, calling on Stan Lee-speak: "What happened to you? This is what happened, influence-peddler! Iron Man happened!" "Ready for anything, Steve Rogers? What about this titanium-powered trio, the Mandroids!" Titanium-powered? I enjoy reading language like this, but rarely do I find it capable of sustaining the illusion of a story to be taken seriously-- and at odd moments, serious is definitely Thomas' goal.
*The Kree-Skrull War* sits at a crossroads between the gee-whiz past and the serious, modern present. It is neither fish nor the fowl. It is, as only Marvel could style it, a mutant.