Kree-Skrull War!

It was the epic of my youth. I'd been reading comics for a few years, especially enjoying Marvel's Space-Born Super-Hero Captain Marvel.


I'd followed Mar-Vell from his Matt Lawson outer-space spy days through his Zo-powered period right through the Shazam-inspired linkage with the hipster Rick Jones.


Old "Silvertop" was a fave, so when my favorite group title The Avengers started featuring him, I was excited.

Actually, due to circumstances beyond my control, I missed the first installment of the Kree-Skrull War in The Avengers #89. But I was there for #90 and from then on followed as first Ronan the Accuser and the always reliable Sentry 459 tore up the North Pole, and later as the Avengers themselves came under siege from the U.S. government. The story unfolded fast, not spread over years.


Now to be fair the underpinnings of the Kree-Skrull War had been laid as deep into Marvel history as Fantastic Four #2 and other stories featuring the Skrulls.



The enmity between the races was a key part of Captain Marvel's battle with the Super-Skrull in Captain Marvel #2 and #3.



The Kree had been introduced with the Sentry 459 who was guarding a secret installation in Fantastic Four#64 and Ronan himself shows up in #65.


The Supreme Intelligence shows up in all his big-brained glory in Captain Marvel #16.


The Inhumans who come to be linked to the Kree were already a part of the Marvel mythology but their story had been unfolding in Amazing Adventures with the royal family in one of their frequent excursions into the wider world. The pieces were in place for an epic story, just waiting to be fused together into something great.

Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema began it, and later Neal Adams famously came aboard and directed some of it. John Buscema had to come in and finish off the saga with one of his typical solid jobs as Rick Jones, the all-purpose sidekick showed that there was more to his psyche than a hankerin' for hot chicks.


The ending of the Kree-Skrull War is all Thomas, who else would've thought that a bunch of Golden Age superheroes would be the coup de grace that ends a sweeping intergalactic conflict. You can see now that he'd set it up well in the earlier issues, but I remember thinking it was a clever solution at the time and tied up some loose ends.

Although I do think the way they forgot about Hawkeye during the battle, only to have him show in the very next issue with Hercules was a hoot. That had to shake Clint's self-image, and it's not hard to see why he tries so very very hard to make an impression on his peers.

That notion of a single world though is what made the Kree-Skrull War succeed, a sense of continuity that is the real secret of Marvel's success. Spidey is awesome and Hulk is obviously incredible, but it's the world of Marvel, the vast universe which is their real addition to modern culture. This was an alternate world that you visited and which was reasonably consistent from visit to visit. It was a neighborhood that had folks in it you felt you knew. The Kree-Skrull War showed that in spades, and brought the elements together in a magnificent way which had up to that time only happened in less opulent doses.

They've tried since to recapture that glory, and have come pretty dang close more than once. Kurt Busiek was pretty good at it. But the Kree-Skrull War was perfect pitch, just the right blend of new an old and it was just plain exciting. Modern epics are too elongated and drawn out, much too slow and they deliver too little in too tiny doses. The Kree-Skrull War was smashed together into less than a dozen issues and the story rocketed along. Each issue had a surprise or ten, the Ant-Man journey in the giant-sized #93 a perfect example.

It's simple enough to understand -- speed thrills!










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