Invasion - Secret No More!

Invasion was a 1988 DC Comics crossover event masterminded by Keith Giffen and scripted by Marvel alumnus Bill Mantlo. It's a three-part tale with numerous crossover titles involved, none of which are included in this volume which only gathers the core trilogy. The parts are oversized eighty pages of pure story in each detailing the planning, execution and aftermath of an all-out alien invasion of our dear planet Earth. This is still the unified post-Crisis Earth. 

The strongest of the installments is the first titled The Alien Alliance which shows the Dominators, a frightening race of aliens who care only for their schemes and are careful to use others to do their extensive dirty work. Their wicked bulbous yellow heads and the maw laced with fangs remined me of the vintage Martians who attacked the planet Earth some decades before this effort in the bubblegum cards from the Topps outfit. The story is plotted by Giffen and he also does the breakdowns for each issue. Mantlo steps up to add the words and in the first issue up and coming artist Todd McFarlane brings his muscular style to effort. He is inked by several talents such as P. Craig Russell, Joe Rubinstein, and Al Gordon. It's nifty tale of mild intrigue as the Dominators bring together a host of awful alien races such as the warlike Khund, Citadelians, Psions, Gil' Dishpan and Okarrans as well as more familiar races such Thanagarians, Durlans and Daxamites. All of these aliens want the Earth neutralized because of its rather odd habit of giving birth to superhumans who will not unlikely find reason to interfere with the schemes of these space folk. The Dominators are after the very secret which makes humans become super and to that end they are not remotely hesitant to kill as many human beings as necessary to discover that secret. The story in fact opens with the slaughter of forty-four humans. That six human beings (including Snapper Carr) survive is a shock to the Dominators since they expected at most one to do so.  By the end of the issue the assembled forces have invaded Earth and utterly taken over Australia. The stage is set for an all-out war as the assembled nations of the planet reject the demand that all superheroes be turned over to the Domnators. 

In the second issue dubbed Battleground Earth we see the war from the human perspective more often as the assembled heroes of Earth attempt to turn back the alien armada. We get reports of how the battles have gone in the connected comic stories and find that places like the Arctic Ocean and Cuba have been major beachheads in the conflict. All the while humans have been captured and experimented upon and the result is not what the Dominators hoped as the discovery of the "Metagene" shows just how potentially powerful the Earth folk can be. And with every battle they seem to become more committed to the fight even as heroes die. The turning point in the war comes when the Daxamites learn that they have enormous power on Earth, or at least near it. They ultimately learn they have a weakness but they don't know what it is and Superman saves the contingent who came with the alien as observers. The Daxamites then send for their fleet to fight alongside the people and heroes of Earth. The enemies are repelled with great costs, but then a little regarded Dominator of a lower caste makes a discovery about the Metagene and his findings bring defeat for the heroes out of the success of repelling the invasion. Todd McFalane does half the penciling in this issue with Giffen taking over to complete it. The same guys are dipping into the inkpots. 

In the third and final installment called World Without Heroes we learn that secret about the Metagene. That secret is the ability to turn the powers of superheroes against themselves. With a wave of energy the lone Dominator weaks havoc on Earth as superheroes become uncontrollable as do their powers and then they begin to weaken and die. Not all heroes of course, only those with some innate kinship to the activation of the Metagene, so folks like Batman, Blue Beetle, Robotman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern and Superman among others are unaffected. But many heroes are afflicted and some die. Ultimately a solution is of course discovered and the world of heroes is saved, at least in part. This finale is a bit of a weird one and actually is a bit unimpressive. The war built nicely in the opening chapter and was waged with furor in the second. But this installment goes another way and seems oddly disconnected. But the artwork is sterling as Bart Sears stepped in to take the penciling reins with the help of inkers like Dick Giordano, Joe Rubenstein, and Pablo Marcos.

 

This is a fairly decent yarn and features some of DC's forgotten heroes from the late 80's such as the fifty Starman and Manhunter (Mark Shaw - the one created by Kirby in 1st Issue Special). Nice to see Adam Strange get some page time in the early stages of the event as well. It was nifty to see the old Charlton heroes getting so much play with all of them appearing save Thunderbolt and Judomaster. Of course the latter was away in WWII and the former I guess was lost to DC for a time. There was a real push to make Captain Atom and Blue Beetle important parts of the DCU and its evidenced in this series. Even Nightshade gets some tasty panels to herself and Peacemaker shows up and he doesn't seem all that crazy yet. This isn't a great story, but it's darn fun one to read. 

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