Congratulations, everyone!  The Secret Invasion is OVER!

Grab your party hat and dancing shoes, the Skrull center (if it ever had one) cannot hold!  They are lost and without their holy guidance that you just couldn’t get them to shut up about!  It’s over!  The heroes will rally and roll over what’s left, right?

A couple weeks ago by now, the Skrull heavens shook with a catastrophic loss that cemented the new era of Incredible Hercules stories permanently into the realm of epic valor and mythology.  Grek Pak has such a zeal for these kinds of tales and with Fred Van Lente along, you always feel like you’re learning a little something as you go.  I could think of no greater architects for the ultimate defeat of the Skrull empire than these two.

Not even Bendis and he’s the guy on the main title.

But, Dear Reader, are you feeling a little confused as to what I’m talking about.  Are you doing the math and finding us with THREE more issues of secret Invasion to go through before we can officially declare a winner?  Am I perhaps putting on the party hats too soon?  Read on.

WARNING: the following contains spoilers for the Secret Invasion tie-in issues of Incredible Hercules, which you all should have read by now anyways.  If you haven’t, go to your LCS and pick ‘em up!  Comics ship late this week and they’ll be glad to see you.

The Skrull Invasion can be defined thusly: an heir to the royal line comes back into power and takes her place as Empress of the Skrull Empire just after her people have been annihilated by Annihulus in Annhilation.  she leads what’s left of her people on a crusade against Earth in the name of her view of the Holy Writ.  The Skrulls infiltrate in the span of a few years and then show up on the doorstep in full force as of Secret Invasion #1.  Since then it’s been full scale war told in fractions by tie-ins, one-shots and the main mini-series.

If you read simply Secret Invasion, you’re getting the story told over the course of a day or so, from big space ship crash to Hawkeye declaring war as of issue 5.  If it wasn’t set in so short a time span, the talk with Maria Hill on the hellicarrier would be a little ridiculously long, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon style.  So, already, we’re dealing with a timeline that’s a little wonky as to what happens when, so when I say the war is over, there’s a fine chance that, no, the war really is over and everyone else needs to catch up to Incredible Herc time.

How could Hercules end the war?  Well, that’s thanks to #120 which introduces us formally to the gods of the Skrull, Sl’gur’t and Kly’bn, through a little storytelling at the beginning of the book before they’re offed at the end.  To get into a little Marvel theology here, the story goes like this: when the Celestials divided the Skrull people into Eternal and Deviant forms, the much more popular Deviants turned around and slaughtered everyone else with their shape-shifting powers.  They ran wild like Hulkamania over Skrullos and finally got to the last guy who wasn’t them, the last Skrull Eternal.  He explained that if they killed him, they’d be killing themselves.  While they reeled from this philosophical whammy, he noted how much better it would be to go out into the universe and show everyone how awesome it would be to lose their singular forms and join them (or die, take your pick), instead of killing him who was in fact, the last singular identity of the Skrull.  Everyone agreed, the warlord who lead the army to kill him married the Skrull Eternal and they rose up to become gods and that brings us to the right here and now.

The Skrull Empress was considered a religious extremist and was exiled from her home.  I’m not saying that the Skrull didn’t fit the definition of ‘warlike people’ before but attacking Earth is pretty suicidal considering how much the heroes of our humble little planet have handed them their collective green patootie.  But no, this religious fanatic, bent on the destruction of cultures and people unlike hers as written down in a holy text, has sent her people disguised into Earth’s midst to undermine the humans from the inside out, to lay traps and in some cases, blow up stark Industries in order to-

Okay, this is getting a little too politically reflexive for me, let’s move on to the part where Hercules is punching space gods.  (Would that make Hercules Obama?  Never mind.)

So, we get their story and point of view out of the way so that we can shove a spine of an elder God (not Elder God) through Kyl’bn, the Skrull God who was the ‘He’ of ‘He loves you’.  As he dies, the Book of Worlds (the holy writ of the Skrulls) rewrites itself:

THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT YOU.  YOU HAVE CAUSED UNTOLD DEATH AND SUFFERING FOR NOTHING.  THE GODS WILL NO LONGER HELP YOU TO LIE TO YOURSELVES.  LOOK UPON THE NAKED FACE OF YOUR OWN PETTY VENIALITY and despair…

Harsh.  The Skrulls all hear the new writ right before the book self-destructs and they declare that all is lost.  They also declare that Reed Richards has escaped, putting this all at the end of Secret Invasion #5.  Handy!

A crusade is traditionally used to describe in our Earth history a series of military expeditions to take land in the name of God.  Crusades are often terrible bloody battles and sometimes they are even called for the wrong reasons.  Divine sources for war and using God (or in this case, Gods) in order to lead masses into battle is a strong rallying point and a way to inspire devotion like no other.  Without their Gods behind them, the Skrulls have taken a more crushing blow than the barrels of soldiers that Ms. Marvel’s been killing left and right or the secret smarts of Reed Richards could ever deliver.

War is over, people, if you want it.

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