Secret Invasion is action packed with some big events, but my still limited superhero knowledge meant I was a little confused and lost in places! I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia and quizzing my Boyfriend to work out who was who.. and I still couldn't tell you them all!

The Skrulls have a clever plan to invade Earth. Over many years they have replaced heroes with identical Skrull agents, and now the superheroes have no idea who they can trust. Tony Stark, having positioned himself as the most powerful man on the planet (and head of SHIELD) is poisoned, Starktech is compromised and the Earth's defense is wide open. They're so busy fighting themselves the battle is almost over before the Skrull even attack, and then all the different powered people of earth must band together.

Like I said.. being somewhat of a Marvel newbie I only knew about 50% of the characters in this (and still only grasp about 70%)! It was fun to learn who they are though. The main headliners take the lead but this was also my first introduction to Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, The Wasp, Mar-vell and Spider-Woman. I had no clue who Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman was and she a pretty big role in this book! It was cool to see the comic book versions of Maria Hill, Mockingbird and Daisy Jones.

It's heavy on the action, which while being cool, involves about 20 characters (on each side) at a time so it's very busy and can be hard to work out exactly what the heck is going on! It all came to a bit of an abrupt end too.. but with some important events that will shake up the universe. Norman Osborne as head of SHIELD, WHAT?!

I believe Dark Reign follow on from this, so maybe I'll go there next.. I did enjoy reading this, it's made me more excited to read more! I've got such a long list of characters I want to check out. ( )

This was probably a pretty great event at the time, but it doesn't really stand well in isolation. The art is so male-gazey too. ( )

I enjoyed this series, although it does seem to be another heroes vs heroes series. I am starting to miss the series of one big bad guy vs a bunch of different heroes. I'm probably reading the wrong series then since these major event series seem to just want to cram every character they can think of into these books. I swear one panel even had Howard the Duck in it.

Anyway, the story was interesting with the reveal of who was and was not a skrull (A shape shifting alien). The thing I wanted to know was how they gave these imposters the super powers of the people they are impersonating. Maybe that was discussed in one of the side issues for each individual character.

Next up is the Event Series "War of Kings". ( )

This was cool and interesting especially how the writing of it played out in real life. Still seems unrealistic that 100's of super skrulls couldn't beat up Earth's superheroes, considering they had the same super powers but there were more of them (powers and skrulls). Also I didn't understand what happened with the Wasp at the end. It seemed like she was going to release a contagion that was going to kill everyone, but then nothing happened. ( )

A good story. The who-can-you-trust/who's-really-a-Skrull dynamic is compelling, especially until a fantastic weapon gets created. The tie-ins back to earlier stories seemed well done. And all the important people make an appearance in one form or another, with the return of off-screen or dead heroes.

The motivations for the Skrull invasion could have been better stated in this volume (rather than just the other tie-ins), but I didn't mind the excess of fight scenes that left room for. ( )