Hank Pym is a skrull! And he’s been a skrull for a while! He’s only found out because The Initiative includes Crusader, a skrull, and both of them like to snack on strawberries and pickles, which apparently mimic the flavor of a skrull delicacy.
Sweet and savory. I like that combination. Maybe I’m a skrull?
We also see that skrulls have invaded Initiative teams, and 3-D man’s glasses somehow reveals them. Like that in that old movie, They Live.
(Note that 3-D Man used to be Triathalon, an equally stupid character.)
It turns out, just about all the Initiative members are skrulls.
Side note: This cover is a tribute to the cover of #1…
Anyway, this story centers around 3-D Man, a character created solely to promote 1960s cutting-edge movie technology. He gets the help of the Skrull Kill Krew along the way.
They teleport around the country killing skrulls, which is really just an excuse to put in a ton of esoteric characters. There’s so many, we need frequent cheat-boxes just to know who everyone is.
Slott, Gage and Caselli even create a few new ones (only those who we see again are tagged below).
Like the “Mavericks” team, which debuted Johnny Cool and Supermax.
Also, “Nonstop” and “Telemetry” who don’t do anything other than pose to the left of 3-D Man’s head. She’s on the “Heavy Hitters” team with Gravity (the guy asking 3-D Man about his glasses) and Outback (who is actually Boomerang, but he’s a good guy now).
Meanwhile, fake Hank Pym takes over the Initiative base and has to fight the various misfits who work there.
Eventually, it’s the skrull Crusader who saves the day. Only, at the end, to get spotted by 3-D Man and…
…Shot in the head. Nice ironic twist there at the end. Others die, too: Whiz Kid, Spinner, and some I can’t even name because I don’t know who they are.
None of this is particularly interesting or awful. If you like a sprawling cast of characters you’ll dig it. But there’s a lot of points of view and they all feel the same. 3-D Man, Eric O’Grady Ant-Man, Crusader…They’re all “outsider” heroes whose character arcs in this story offer them some form of atonement. A tighter narrative focus would have made this much better but, then again, you can probably say that about a lot of big event tie-in stories.
And we’re going right from this one into the Dark Reign tie-in.
English (US) · 