The "New" New Avengers

[Hoax]

I really do miss that avatar, I think, or was it one with Tiki masks of some sort?  Either way there was an avatar that I loved but it has ceased to be.   

[HaemishM]

I still have it somewhere. I might resurrect it some day.

[TenaciousMike]

Well, with the latest issue picking up right after the annual, not much really happens other than Luke Cage and Jessica Jones having a lover's spat on the steps of (Mighty) Avenger's Tower.  Leads to a nice little cliffhanger, though.

This issue leads me to believe that Luke Cage is a skrull.  I think a lot of people are expecting Jessica Jones (and baby) are Skrulls, but I think that Luke Cage has been a Skrull all along, and he wants to avoid the Might Avengers to avoid detection.  And the baby is a half-skrull.

I think we aught to start a "Secret Invasion" thread.

[Velorath]

I think we aught to start a "Secret Invasion" thread.

If I thought there was any reasonable way to differentiate between hints that Bendis puts into the books and his overall poor understanding of many of the characters he's written since his Avengers run started, then I'd have loved to do a Secret Invasion thread.  If I really thought he'd been laying the groundwork for this since New Avengers #1 instead of meandering around never really able to see any of his story arcs through to an actual conclusion, I'd be willing to discuss Secret Invasion.  I don't really have any desire to follow a story that with each reveal of a character being a Skrull potentially invalidates months or possibly years of character development, unless the Skrulls all end up replacing complete fucking z-listers nobody cares about anyway.

[Llava]

For him to be a Skull, they'd have to completely negate the issue with everyone soul-searching about their feelings on the whole Secret Invasion and then Doc Strange doing a spell to prove that none of them are Skrulls- at least, none of them think they are.  Though hypnosis isn't exactly rare in comics.

[Lantyssa]

Maybe there are separate factions of Skrulls.  Each is busy replacing their own set of heroes and some accidental overlaps occur.  By the time this is all revealed, only a few people will be the original.  The stories from then on can deal with being a human in a world full of Skrulls.

Of course the first person each faction duplicates is Logan, which is why he manages to be in so many books.  It's perfect!

[Khaldun]

For him to be a Skull, they'd have to completely negate the issue with everyone soul-searching about their feelings on the whole Secret Invasion and then Doc Strange doing a spell to prove that none of them are Skrulls- at least, none of them think they are.  Though hypnosis isn't exactly rare in comics.

I'm thinking that the one character Bendis may actually have done poorly "on purpose" is Strange himself, which makes the truth spell irrelevant. Though on the other hand, it invalidates the very human, appealing, and consistently-portrayed Strange of World War Hulk. (And of course, it also doesn't make any damn sense: why would a Skrull Dr. Strange bust his ass and take enormous risks to defeat the Hulk?)

That's the basic problem with the whole Secret Invasion conceit: it's so obviously not tightly plotted, not tightly planned, and a simple way to get out of the various problems that the bad character work of Civil War created, that it almost can't possibly work well as a series. If you want to see how good writing can trump bad writing, look at McDuffie's Fantastic Four run, which took some of the atrocious stuff done to Reed Richards as a character and actually found a way to make it work out coherently and catalyze some good stories. Secret Invasion is bad writing chasing bad writing. Bad writing times two doesn't equal good writing.

[Llava]

Bad writing times two doesn't equal good writing.

Unless they come up with a plot device that makes it so it does!