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Wizard World Chicago: Secret Invasion panel
Posted: Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Posted By: Geoff Collins
Brian Michael Bendis stood up at the podium for the Secret Invasion panel the afternoon following the death of Michael Turner and paid tribute to him, said some of his own thoughts and feelings about Turner and posted Turner's art on the projectors. To say he was choked up during the tribute and for part of the panel would be going too far, but the effects of the death were clear on his face, especially compared to the others on the panel. When he closed his tribute, Bendis jokingly said, "And with that, here comes the awkward transition to talk about Skrulls."Bendis got a chance to talk about his influences for the story line. "I was reading Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs, who is a crazy guy and I love all of his books," Bendis started, "His book Ruled by Secrecy which is about all the secret societies in the world was what inspired the Illuminati, because I thought 'Hey, what would be the powerful white-guy secret society in the Marvel Universe.'" Illuminati, according to conspiracy theorists, is a group of world leaders who control the world through manipulation. Because so many different theorists throw the term around it's not so much a well-defined group of people like the Free Masons, but more of a term used to refer to the highest level of secret societies. "Alien Agenda inspired a great many ideas including what's going on with Walker in the Power series," Bendis continued, "I've always been into the Skrulls and the legacy of it and how every storyline…added to their mythology… It is one of those things that did have kind of a layer of cheese on it sometimes, and I loved to scrape the cheese off and get to what's the scariest version of this concept. Stan Lee has admitted it flat out, Skrulls were stolen from Invasion of the Body Snatchers--the original one--and that Cold War paranoia of 'they walk among us.'" Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a movie from the 1950s where a doctor is getting patients claiming others are being replaced by doppelgangers and he slowly finds that their claims are true. "We definitely live in that society again," Bendis said, "You get on a plane--who is gonna rush the cockpit? I don't know. It could be anybody. I thought, 'Well, we definitely live in that world again. So what's the scariest plan the Skrulls would actually do?'" Later in answering a question, Bendis emphasized the religious aspects of the invasion, so rather then being a communism or McCarthyism like Invasion of the Body Snatchers it's definitely going to apply to modern times with the War on Terror.
Page from Secret Invasion #4
"I came to Tom (Brevoort) with this in the development of the New Avengers series," Bendis told the audience on when the idea started, "The format in which it was going to take--whether it was going to be just inside Avengers books or inside other books and what-have-you--was building as time went on." Bendis was certain to give much credit to Brevoort's hand in his position as an editor and influencing this build up. Bendis continued, "As other events like House of M and Civil War happened, it accentuated the fact that (Skrulls are) like, 'Ooh Civil War, this is fantastic. Oh! The Hulk is gonna drop on New York, please drop on New York. That's another thing we [the Skrulls] don't have to do.' It builds and builds." In one of the recent books, Bendis hints that Skrulls even had a hand in the destruction of Genosha which happened three years before New Avengers was launched. He explained, "For the last couple of years at the retreat we talked about it and last year Joe [Quesada] said to us, 'If you really want to do it right, if you really want to go farther than anything like this has gone before, it's gotta be a Marvel Universe book, not just Avengers titles.'"
So who is a Skrull?
The panel confirmed that Hulk is not a Skrull. When asked about Scarlet Witch, the mutant at the center of House of M which was written by Bendis, he said, "Wanda is off the table for a little while, but there is a story cooking with her."
One audience member brought up an interview Bendis did where he said that Iron Man isn't a Skrull, but in Secret Invasion #3 there is a scene where Iron Man is told that he is a Skrull who was brainwashed to sincerely believe he is human. Is Iron Man a Skrull? "I do a lot of lying," Bendis joked before the fanboy could actually ask a question, "Questions (from some people) are just trying to trick me into telling the whole story, so I was just lying because I wanted (readers) to enjoy the story." This was followed by a series of 'Who do you trust?' jokes.Though there weren't surprise reveals during the panel, Bendis did talk about how the Skrulls were selected. "We rip up a copy of the [Marvel] Handbook and throw it in the air and whoever lands on the top stair [is a Skrull]," Bendis joked, "There were a few that I called early. The big ones--Spider Woman, Iron Man--the ones you've seen the last few weeks I locked down before everything goes all to hell." It should be noted that Bendis did not clearly say "Iron Man." It was very quick but definitely "Man," and he didn't say explicitly that he's a Skrull. "Joe [Quesada] wisely said, 'We're locking down the list and that's it. We're not doing Skrull of the week all summer long."
"By the end of Secret Invasion #8 you're going to know pretty comfortably who is a Skrull and wasn't a Skrull," Brevoort told us, "Whether we're going to have a page and a half on Beast or Wonder Man it's all going to be in the context of the story."
Since they were promoting the title, there was much talk of some of the tie-ins coming up. Spider-Man will have its first splash into the rest of the Marvel U since One More Day. In the most recent issue of Uncanny X-Men the team announces its relocation to San Francisco, which is important after hearing Brevoort say, "We'll see the Skrulls descending on San Francisco, not realizing the X-Men are there," and later Bendis hints that the Skrull v. X-Men fight should be a big splash.
Something that excited me to hear was that Jonathan Hickman would be writing one of the crossovers. Hickman is an artist and writer doing a lot with Image including Nightly News and a handful of sci-fi minis where he's doing the writing and art which are chronically late. But he's really imaginative and is pushing the medium. The problem is that he's doing Secret Warriors and isn't doing art. Since one of his best attributes is the concepts he comes up with, the fact that he's using Bendis' concept of a group assembled by Nick Fury to battle Skrulls takes away one aspect of his writing. Even though I doubt it'll be a good example of Hickman's work, it's getting his foot in the door with a Big Two company. Hopefully his titles will start coming out on time.A cover for an "Evil Illuminati" one-shot was shown at the panel. The title will come out in early 2009 so it can't possibly have a direct effect on the Secret Invasion story this summer, but it was interesting to look at. Since they kept teasingly changing the slide it was hard to take in everything, but the characters depicted are similar to the Marvel Illuminati but with big enough differences to make it apparent it wasn't the same guys and there were two women in the group. However, the man on the right side does look exactly like Namor the Sub-Mariner and the woman to the left looks like Emma Frost.
Hardly anything was said about the fall-out of the book, but Bendis does tease. "Truthfully when we pitched--and Tom [Brevoort] will back me up on this--when it was pitched to Joe [Quesada] and everybody the aftermath of Secret Invasion is what got everybody really excited."
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