This may come as a surprise to some who sleep through their English classes, but stories generally follow a fairly simple structure known as a plot. There’s the initial situation where we get the background information and set-up for who’s who and what’s what. This is also known as the exposition. After that we have the rising action. Kicking this off is the inciting force. The inciting force is that which kicks off the conflict, or problem. This problem will be made worse by various smaller problems which act to pile upon the main conflict, known as complications. This all leads to the turning point or crisis where events begin to sharply turn towards their conclusion. The result of this turning point, the drama’s highest point, is the climax. This leads directly into the resolution or denouement, which concludes the action.
Stories also maintain four major character types. First is the protagonist, our main character. Next is the antagonist, or he/they who is set against our main character(s). The foil is our supporting character who gets to provide contrast to the protagonist (usually the protagonist anyway, sometimes the antagonist). Finally, we have various supporting characters who generally serve to fill out the world and make the story seem real. What’s all this got to do with comics, you ask? Everything. These are the necessary parts to a story. Without them, all you’re left with is shit that happens. What’s this got to do with Secret Invasion? Well, Secret Invasion manages to fail at just about every measure of what makes a story more than shit that happens. Let’s examine, shall we?
The Initial Situation of Secret Invasion was fairly ham-fisted. The heroes all knew there were Skrulls among them and were unsure who to trust thanks to prior events in New Avengers. With them knowing an invasion is looming, the heroes all immediately converge upon an alien ship that landed in the Savage Land where they are promptly stranded and a litany of 70s and 80s heroes who were either dead or had questionable continuity got off the ship. The heroes converging on this ship in the manner they did made absolutely no sense. They knew they had no way of knowing which Skrulls were real and which weren’t, yet no one had a plan to detain those that got off the ship or proper backup incase it was a trap (which it obviously was).
At this point, the next several issues are spent with the heroes and these new arrivals wandering around the Savage Land aimlessly. Around the same time, Reed Richards is captured and the Skrulls begin an invasion by sending out Super Skrulls to attack various parts of the world. So, there’s our initial situation… and conflict all rolled into one big mess. The exposition fails to establish proper motivation for the heroes, leaving them an unorganized mess for a crew that knows an invasion is coming. It even fails to single out which heroes will operate as the main protagonist(s), though Ronin, or Hawkeye as he’s better known, does become the de-facto protagonist by getting most of the better heroic scenes. The exposition does set up that the Skrulls are shape-shifters who want Earth and that this is to full-fill a prophecy, even though they’re left without active protagonists because those are off in a subplot to address the “who can you trust?” tagline in the Savage Land. .
Okay, so that leaves us the Inciting Action to cover. That’s pretty simple- the Skrulls invade and the heroes are out of the way. Our question becomes “Can the heroes figure out who to trust in time to stop the Skrulls?” Our protagonists are set up, however, as wholly stranded and with no means of success. This, naturally, is the complication, along with the fact that the Skrulls can simply over-power anyone. The Inciting Action is easily the most successful part of the series.
Now, we run into a problem. This action needs to rise into the turning point. The situation needs to get worse and progress needs to occur. Of course, that doesn’t happen. What happens instead is that the Conflict is restated again and again by the characters on both sides of the issues. Driving the conflict home is very important naturally, but the danger is supposed to become more intense as time goes on. Devoting two issues worth of pages to establishment- the job of an effective exposition- doesn’t make a reader care more. Repeating the situation over and over turns the rising action instead into a steady lull. It is possible to overcome this since the initial conflict over the fate of the Earth is such a big one. O
vercoming the lack of complications or increase in drama could be done either by creating such a compelling character arc that the focus shifts from the external to the internal how a major character is dealing with the central problem or by creating a compelling enough mystery that the reader’s guessing games become an increase in the drama in and of themselves. The latter is a bit lazy, but can be incredibly effective in generating interest even in a sub-par book (see Hush).
Bendis attempted to create both an interesting enough character arc and enough mystery to distract from the lack of progress in the central plot, but, as we’ll see time and again with this book, failed to properly maintain focus well enough to establish either. Bendis chose to try and give a sense of the scope of the story by spreading the stories focus to a lot of macro scenes and including small scenes for a large cast. This simply did not leave room enough to develop that Hawkeye had his supposedly dead wife come off the plane. Ironically with so little actually occurring that hadn’t already been established, the continued attempts to impress readers with the scale of the event forced the emotional chaos of Hawkeye in seeing his wife and not knowing whether she was a Skrull into a subplot where it did not receive the focus necessary to create a deep reader caring.
Two mysteries were added to help generate reader interest. The first was which of the heroes that came off the ship and which of those already on the island were really Skrulls. The second is who the he is in the Skrulls “He loves you” tagline. The key to a good mystery is for hints to lead into a satisfying, surprising reveal. The surprise should be such that it seems to make the pieces of earlier clues fit together in a coherent, logical manner. For the first mystery, they failed so fundamentally that there weren’t even any clues. The heroes all turned out to be Skrulls so the earlier drama meant nothing nor did the fact that these Skrulls believed they were these heroes. In fact, the protagonists didn’t even solve the mystery. An off panel dues ex machina in the form of a suddenly escaped Reed Richards shows up with a Skrull revealing gun and all is made clear. The series central conceit of who can be trusted was rendered moot by a character not in the core members of the protagonists. There’s no emotional payoff, there’s no big reveal, there’s no hints, it didn’t build drama, one character was tormented a bit in a subplot… there’s simply no reason to have cared about any of that subplot. It didn’t need to be in the book and it certainly didn’t need to be around for that long. As for “He loves you,” well, that was an allusion to the Skrull god who played absolutely no part in the main series and was relegated to the (far-superior) “Incredible Hercules.” “He loves you” was a mystery that wasn’t even a mystery for the right book.
The turning point is that Reed has escaped and made it possible to see who the Skrulls are. This is supposed to be a major point, but at this point, showing no logic, the Skrulls have stopped acting in secret and hiding using their shape-shifting powers even though they were already in charge in this manner and begun a full-out military assault for no adequately explained reason. This is then made worse by the fact that the Skrulls fight on the ground using powers instead of in space-ships far more advanced than anything found one Earth. With Earth’s heroes now rallying from the Savage Land with Reed, the other teams of the Marvel Universe plan to attack the Skrulls as well, notably the Hood’s villains, Norman Osborne’s Thunderbolts and Nick Fury’s Secret Warriors. These points are explained in more detail in various other series, a fine decision for side-characters. All of these characters, for no readily apparent reason, decide to congregate in Central Park to fight with each other… even though the Skrulls still have Space Ships. An Idiot plot is when characters act in completely illogical ways simply to make the plot move forward in the way the author intends, even though the characters themselves have no reason to behave in this manner. Secret Invasion as a whole, but particularly everything in the prior paragraph, is full of quintessential examples of the idiot plot.
The turning point leads to the act of climax. During this all the heroes (including some teams gathered in ancillary titles) unite in central park to fight the antagonists. The fight is fairly fun… but when is the climax? Is it when the Wasp dies? How about when Norman kills the Skrull Queen? Is it Hawkeye’s big arrow killing spree? How about the arrival of Noh-Varr that turns the battle’s tide? It can’t be any of those- the story is without a climax. Let’s take these in reverse order. The heroes are losing until Noh-Varr shows up… but he gets one major panel. Beyond that, he’s shown to do precisely nothing before or after in the main series. Hawkeye’s big moment works best as a climax due to the earlier attention paid to him, but since he didn’t actually accomplish anything (the Skrull Queen survived his attack), but killing a few Skrulls- a feat which occurred every few seconds in the heat of the battle. His moment simply isn’t important enough. Norman killing the Skrull Queen is almost certainly intended as the climax, yet all the set-up for it is in Thunderbolts. If you don’t read that book, then you’re left wondering why this bit character is coming out of left field and taking over the (ahem) plot you’ve been reading. It works as a climax if you read Thunderbolts, but that still doesn’t make it the climax for this book. The Wasp dying isn’t a climax, it’s a hero specific moment, hell it barely even makes sense that in a huge battle one hero only dies (ignoring the fact that the Skrulls didn’t just fire down from their space-ships and avoid fisticuffs all together). Getting it requires a flashback to another book from months ago and at no point in this series has the Wasp come off as a main protagonist. Her death means nothing in the context of the story. This book’s plot simply leaves out the Climax.
They do, however, have a resolution and that is, the Earthling win! Hooray! We get a new status quo with Norman Osborn in charge and all the “dead” replaced heroes returning. So… we got a bunch of stuff that happened as an advertisement for Marvel’s new marketing promo: Dark Reign! Hope you enjoyed your $32 (or waited 2 weeks for the trade for $12 less!).
