History ComicBook / SecretInvasion2008

* LivingWeapon: [[spoiler:Black Bolt is kept alive by the Skrulls so he could be made into one, creating a ship that could convert his MakeMeWannaShout powers into planet-sized sonic blasts. He's rescued by Medusa and the Inhumans before this can come to pass.]]

** Played straight at one point with Maria Hill, who's being held at gunpoint by Skrulls, and starts telling them about the time Nick Fury told her about Life Model Decoys. You can probably see where this is going. The Skrulls don't, and shoot 'Hill'', only to find it's an LMD.
* ADayInTheLimelight: Since Spider-Man is busy with the Avenger, the Amazing Spider-Man tie-in actually features Jackpot (Alana Johnson) saving Spidey's supporting cast from the Skrull invasion and Menace.

* ArcWords: ''"Accept change"'' and ''"He loves you"''.

* BackFromTheDead: [[spoiler:The ending reveals ''dozens'' (and probably more) of characters who'd been kept alive by the Skrulls after being replaced by infiltration agents, including Mockingbird, who'd supposedly been KilledOffForReal years ago.]]
* BadassInDistress: Many, but especially ''ComicBook/BlackBolt'', who was considered one of the most powerful people in the Marvel Universe, then was easily caught. When he comes back, he goes on a RoaringRampageOfRevenge in response.
* TheBadGuyWins: Subverted. The story ''does'' end with a [[ComicBook/NormanOsborn bad guy]] winning, but not any of the Skrulls.

* BigBadWannabe: Quite possibly Veranke. She planned big, manages to capture and impersonate a bunch of powerful heroes... only to have it culminate in an EasilyThwartedAlienInvasion. Then she gets stomped/popped/killed by Norman Osborn, who uses the power he's handed as a result to cause much ''bigger'' problems in the next event ''ComicBook/DarkReign''.

** Done heartbreakingly with Hawkeye and Mockingbird. He asks her to give a detail only Bobbi Morse could know, and she does - the date she miscarried their baby. [[spoiler:Except she's not Bobbi, she's a Skrull, and she doesn't know it.]]

** Wasp being turned into a giant biological bomb against her will. Made all the creepier by her full awareness of the process and who's responsible, and her attempts to flee. It doesn't help (see the Mercy Kill entry below).
** Reed Richards' utterly horrifying "interrogation" at the Skrulls' hands; it involves his body being stretched grotesquely by various suction devices until he's the size of a soccer pitch.

** Hank Pym, ''even in captivity''. Why? Because the Skrull impersonating him complains that he got zero respect for impersonating Pym.

** The Skrull impersonating [[spoiler:Hank Pym]] gets a little bit of this in one of the ''ComicBook/MightyAvengers'' tie-ins: he meets with the Skrull impersonating [[spoiler:Dum Dum Dugan]] and tells him the invasion won't work because HumansAreSpecial. For standing out in a crowd, he's killed and replaced. As it turned out, Skrull [[spoiler:Pym]] was right.

* ChekhovsGun: The growth serum Hank Pym gave Janet van Dyne back in ''Mighty Avengers'' issue #6 comes back in issue #7 of this event. [[spoiler:Turns out it's also a last-ditch weapon as well.]]

* DeadpanSnarker: Possibly overused (this ''is'' a [[AuthorTract Bendis comic after all]]), but among a cast full of snark, John the Skrull managed to stand out.

* DecompressedComic: While the timelines of all the various tie-ins vary, the once-a-month issue release of crossover's central miniseries meant that it took two-thirds of a ''year'' to tell what essentially amounted to between a few hours and a couple of days of story. Heavily contributed to reader disappointment. A joke amongst detractors of the book as it was coming out was "Are they ''still'' in the Savage Land?" in reference to how the main characters went to the Savage Land at the very beginning of the book and stayed there until the end of issue five. What happened in between? Uh...

* EasilyThwartedAlienInvasion: PlayedWith. Many people see the conclusion ([[spoiler:one battle in Central Park and Thor taking down the entire damn fleet by himself]]) as this. The fact that the [[ConservationOfNinjutsu Super-Skrulls were so easily killed to a point where every tie-in has a kill count in the hundreds didn't help]]. One big problem was that one tie-in featured Deadpool discovering the means to kill the Skrull Queen and passing the information on to Norman Osborn (he was supposed to pass that information on to ''Nick Fury'', but Osborn intercepted it). If you read that tie-in, you realized that Osborn had a gun made to those specifications and used it during the final fight to kill the otherwise-invulnerable queen, making himself the hero of the day. If you didn't read the tie-in, it looked like Osborn beat the queen by... shooting her with a gun. And was lauded as the savior of Earth for happening to be the person who fired the lucky shot. It was ''never even mentioned'' during the battle that if anyone other than Osborn had shot her, it wouldn't have killed her. But the invasion still caused immense damage on Earth, including eroding the population's trust in S.H.I.E.L.D. and many heroes, which lead to a power vacuum that Norman Osborn was very eager to fill, leading to the events of ''ComicBook/DarkReign''.

* EnemyMine: Oh, boy...
** The Mighty & New Avengers start off at each other's throats due to the events of ''ComicBook/{{Civil War|2006}}'', but after realizing that the Skrulls are invading ''right now'', start working together.

** Longstanding enemy of the Fantastic Four, The Tinkerer, helps the Human Torch & the Thing escape the Negative Zone.

* {{Flanderization}}: Under Bendis, the Skrulls go from your typical jerkass aliens to religious fundamentalists constantly muttering "he loves you", something not really in keeping with their prior depictions (wherein Skrulls had at least two gods, rather than the one). Several characters in the side-stories point out how utterly unlike them this is, with even the ''Super-Skrull'' telling Nova he finds the modern jihadism (his words) disturbing. It's noted that Veranke's fundamentalist attitude has struck a chord with them after everything that's happened[[note]]Admittedly, between Veranke's prophecy (at least the part about Galactus destroying the Skrull homeworld) being demonstrated to be true, and the emotional [=BSOD=] from having your home planet destroyed, it's little wonder that a lot of Skrulls have gone this way; people (humans at least) will follow almost anything or anyone who claims to have answers and security when the rest of your world is falling apart (no pun intended)[[/note]].
* FlyingBrick: Captain Britain, Sentry, Wonder Man, Ms. Marvel, Iron Man, etc...

* HeroicSacrifice: Captain Britain, to stop the Skrulls, though he doesn't stay dead terribly long thanks to Pete Wisdom and Merlin.
* HeroWithBadPublicity: Thanks to this event, ComicBook/IronMan becomes this, as the failure to prevent the invasion is dumped entirely on his shoulders, since he'd been the S.H.I.E.L.D. director at the time. Also, almost everyone still treats ComicBook/SpiderWoman like she's Veranke in disguise, never mind the fact that Norman Osborn putting a round through the Skrull Queen's head on live television is what ''got him his government position in the first place''.

** And the Skrull Kill Krew hates them for being Skrulls.

* KickTheDog:
** A lot of readers, and many of the Initiative students, view 3-D man's shooting of Crusader as this.
** The first indication that the Skrull's claims of being semi-peaceful are BS is when they start executing the captured Initative members (also known to us humans as a war crime), who for extra dog-kicking are teenagers.

** ComicBook/LukeCage pulls this early on in the story. As the Savage Land copycats come off the ship, Ares notes to fight them is a calculated distraction on the Skrulls' part and that they should retreat back to New York. Cage however punches out Afro!Cage and the heroes bog themselves down in a pretty pointless fight. The battle scatters the heroes and leaves them wandering around for over half the series before Abigail Brand and Reed Richards come to rescue them.

** And Noh-Varr, after announcing himself as the new CAPTAIN MARVEL!

* MurderIsTheBestSolution: Since the only surefire way to detect Skrulls is that [[ThisWasHisTrueForm they revert to their true form when killed]], Drax the Destroyer's solution to the threat of Skrull infiltrators is to kill ''every single person in Knowhere''. Oh, and then [[DeathIsCheap resuscitate them all]]. And it works.

* OffscreenMomentOfAwesome: And Offscreen Moment of Nightmare Fuel as well. In ''Guardians of the Galaxy'', after the main event's over, Star-Lord goes rushing off to Hala to see what's happened to the Kree, long-time enemy No. 1 of the Skrulls, while everyone else was busy. Turned out the Kree found out about the Skrulls instantly (a million years of war makes you ''good'' at spotting shapeshifters), and killed them all. The result is a literal ''mountain'' worth of Skrull corpses.

** Veranke, after her last resort ([[spoiler:turning the Wasp into a Bio-Weapon & killing everyone]]) has failed, and she sees every single superhero, vigilante, and supervillain charging at her. All she can do is repeat "[[MadnessMantra He loves me]]".
** Jessica Jones has a moment of this when she sees Jarvis among the rescued people that were replaced by Skrulls, as she realizes she left her baby in the hands of a Skrull.

* PedestrianCrushesCar: {{Averted|Trope}} in the ''ComicBook/SheHulk'' tie-in. When Super-Skrull throws She-Hulk into a plane, she knows she's going to end up crushing it due to her being NighInvulnerability in She-Hulk form, thus killing anyone inside. So she turns off her powers just before hitting the plane, and the impact almost kills her human body.

* HumanAlienDiscovery: PlayedWith. Although this is more a ChangelingTale for superheroes and villains having Skrull infiltrators as {{Manchurian Agent}}s, various of them have suppressed their memories of being Skrulls and, even more, they ''do'' believe were HumanAllAlong until the ArcWords are pronounced and they discovered the truth ([[BodyHorror for their own horror]].)

* DownerEnding: When the only person to get anything good out of a story by the end is ''Norman Osborn'', you know this is the case.
%%* DroppedABridgeOnHim: Wasp, and ''how''.

* CreepyCrossdresser: Seems kind of a no-brainer- Skrulls are {{Voluntary Shapeshift|ing}}ers and can turn into male or female independent of their original gender, but the Skrull that posed as Elektra is a notable example since it was his death that kicked off the story.

* DebateAndSwitch: Invoked. After the end of the ''Comicbook/CivilWar'', Luke Cage thought that they should find the BigBad behind it and the other recent disasters (ComicBook/{{Secret War|2004}}, ComicBook/AvengersDisassembled, ComicBook/HouseOfM), and make things right again. And he was happy to discover the Skrull conspiracy, but the Skrulls aren't behind any of those things. As pointed out by Iron Fist, there was no big bad, things were screwed simply because they were screwed.

** The Mighty & New Avengers start off at each other's throats due to the events of ''ComicBook/CivilWar'', but after realizing that the Skrulls are invading ''right now'', start working together.

* PsychologicalProjection: ComicBook/IronMan came to think that ComicBook/CaptainAmerica had been replaced by a Skrull before the events of ''ComicBook/CivilWar'' because Cap is a reasonable person and would have agreed the SuperheroRegistrationAct was the right thing to do if it were ''really'' him... [[EvilCannotComprehendGood right?]] Meanwhile, the anti-SuperheroRegistrationAct heroes are trying to get at Tony to prove ''he'' was replaced by a Skrull for the opposite reasons. [[spoiler: Neither Tony nor Steve was actually replaced by Skrulls, so their actions are their own. For better or worse.]]

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Once everything's over, Iron Man tries to talk to Thor, who quite curtly shoots him down, telling Tony he is '''not''' forgiven for all the crap he's pulled since ''ComicBook/CivilWar'', and that everything that's taken place that day is a consequence.

* ShapeshifterGuiltTrip: Several Skrulls shapeshift into corpses and claim to be victims of [[ComicBook/CivilWar the Stamford Incident]]. Although it works on Penance at first, he remembers the faces of everyone who really perished and attacks.

* VillainWithGoodPublicity: Norman Osborn was already this due to his efforts of hunting down rogue heroes post-''ComicBook/CivilWar'', but thanks to being the one to deal the final blow to Queen Veranke, thus being credited to ending the invasion, he's elevated more than ever before.

** [[Characters/MarvelComicsSavageLand Shanna the She-Devil]] also steals a female S.H.I.E.L.D. agents uniform so she can investigate their operation in the Savage Land. But she also [[AccidentalMurder hits said agent too hard and ends up killing her]], which luckily leads Shanna to discover the agent was actually a Skrull.

* TapOnTheHead: {{Deconstructed}}. [[Characters/MarvelComicsSavageLand Shanna the She-Devil]] tries to knock out a female S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in order to [[MuggedForDisguise steal her uniform]], but the karate chop to the neck ends up ''killing her'' instead. It turns out that the "agent" was actually a Skrull impostor anyway, so there's [[AngstWhatAngst no resulting angst]].

** ComicBook/ShannaTheSheDevil also steals a female S.H.I.E.L.D. agents uniform so she can investigate their operation in the Savage Land. But she also [[AccidentalMurder hits said agent too hard and ends up killing her]], which luckily leads Shanna to discover the agent was actually a Skrull.

* TapOnTheHead: {{Deconstructed}}. ComicBook/ShannaTheSheDevil tries to knock out a female S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in order to [[MuggedForDisguise steal her uniform]], but the karate chop to the neck ends up ''killing her'' instead. It turns out that the "agent" was actually a Skrull impostor anyway, so there's [[AngstWhatAngst no resulting angst]].

In the wake of the ComicBook/CivilWar2006, the ComicBook/NewAvengers confront the assassin ComicBook/{{Elektra}}. But when Elektra is killed in battle, [[ThisWasHisTrueForm her body turns green, revealing her as a shapeshifting alien Skrull]]. Turns out the Skrulls had perfected a technique that lets them impersonate ''anyone'', undetectable even to telepathy, super senses, magic and anything else the superheroes can come up with. The Avengers' (and fans') reaction? ''OhCrap.''

In the wake of the ComicBook/CivilWar, the ComicBook/NewAvengers confront the assassin ComicBook/{{Elektra}}. But when Elektra is killed in battle, [[ThisWasHisTrueForm her body turns green, revealing her as a shapeshifting alien Skrull]]. Turns out the Skrulls had perfected a technique that lets them impersonate ''anyone'', undetectable even to telepathy, super senses, magic and anything else the superheroes can come up with. The Avengers' (and fans') reaction? ''OhCrap.''

The story involves The Skrulls, an [[RubberForeheadAliens alien]] race of [[VoluntaryShapeshifting shapeshifters]] who have (mostly) played a villainous role in the Franchise/MarvelUniverse. After [[ComicBook/{{Annihilation}}a series of disasters]], the Skrull Empire is greatly weakened, and a religious figure, Queen Veranke, convinces them that their destiny is to rule the Earth. With help from an extraordinary Skrull scientist, a process is created that allows the Skrulls to fool all known means of detection- [[ThisWasHisTrueForm only upon their deaths do they revert to their true form]]. Over a period of several years, they secretly replace several Marvel characters, with Veranke herself taking the place of ComicBook/SpiderWoman. These [[Literature/TheManchurianCandidate Sleeper Agents]] have even been brainwashed into believing themselves to ''be'' the replaced person, until a code phrase ("He Loves You" a reference to the Skrulls' god) awakens their true memories. In addition, the Skrulls have figured out how to duplicate the powers of many of Earth's heroes, and even prepared some agents with multiple powers. As the story begins, the awakened Skrull agents begin undermining the hero groups and organizations capable of defeating them, then invade in force...

[[quoteright:349:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/secret_invasion.png]]

* AsYouKnow: Used in the very first issue to bring the audience up to speed about S.W.O.R.D. [[note]]'''S'''entient '''W'''orld '''O'''bservation and '''R'''esponse ''D''epartment.[[/note]]

** Snowbird ends up sleeping with Hercules to drown the loneliness she feels even since her ''ComicBook/AlphaFlight'' teammates were killed in ''ComicBook/NewAvengers''. Also doubles as a PreClimaxClimax, since it was the night before their fight with the Skrull pantheon.

** In the first issue, Reed Richards is performing an autopsy on the Skrull who'd posed as Elektra. An overhead shot gives a full view of her body, with a [[LensFlareCensor convenient light-blocking her crotch]], Reed's hair covering one breast, and GodivaHair covering the other. Ironically, one of the following panels also shows the naked Skrull from another angle, but this time with no creative censors, just a BarbieDollAnatomy.

* OnceMoreWithClarity: Several moments from previous Avengers stories are revisited, this time with the knowledge that one or more characters involved are Skrull impostors, and often from the point of view of said Skrull agents. Of note is ''ComicBook/NewAvengers'' #43 that has ADayInTheLimelight of [[spoiler:Queen Veranke as Spider-Woman, with issue revising many of her previous scenes]].

** When we see the morning after Wonder Man and Ms. Marvel SexForSolace, he's naked in bed with a sheet placed on his crotch. When Carol walks, she's already dressed in her uniform, telling him to suit up because they have a mission.

** Hank Pym and [[spoiler:Criti Noll, his Skrull lover disguises as a woman]] make a lot of use of this in post-sex scenes in the ''ComicBook/MightyAvengers'' {{flashback}} tie-in that shows how [[spoiler:Criti Noll [[HoneyTrap seduced, captured and replaced Hank]].]]

* LensFlareCensor: In the first issue, Reed Richards is performing an autopsy on the Skrull who'd posed as Elektra. An overhead shot gives a full view of her body, with a convenient light-blocking her crotch and GodivaHair over her breasts.

** Nick Fury theorizes this is why [[spoiler:the Skrull kept most of the people they replaced as prisoners, instead of killing them, so they could use them as bargaining ships if needed]].

* IhaveYourWife: The Skrulls aren't above kidnapping or threatening the hero's loved ones.

* {{Gaslighting}}: When confronting him, Veranke attempts to convince Tony Stark that he's a Skrull. And as Black Widow pints out, she actually has no reason to do keep him alive other than [[EvilIsPetty to make him suffer more]].

* {{Flanderization}}: Under Bendis, the Skrulls go from your typical jerkass aliens to religious fundamentalists constantly muttering "he loves you", something not really in keeping with their prior depictions (wherein Skrulls had at least two gods, rather than the one). Several characters in the side-stories point out how utterly unlike them this is, with even the ''Super-Skrull'' telling Nova he finds the modern jihadism (his words) disturbing. It's noted that Veranke's fundamentalist attitude has struck a chord with them after everything that's happened[[note]]Admittedly, between Veranke's prophecy (at least the part about Galactus destroying the Skrull homeworld) being demonstrated to be true, and the emotional [=BSOD=] from having your home planet destroyed, it's little wonder that a lot of Skrulls have gone this way; people (humans at least) will follow almost anything or anyone who claims to have answers and security when the rest of your world is falling apart (no pun intended[[/note]].

* {{Flanderization}}: Under Bendis, the Skrulls go from your typical jerkass aliens to religious fundamentalists constantly muttering "he loves you", something not really in keeping with their prior depictions (wherein Skrulls had at least two gods, rather than the one). Several characters in the side-stories point out how utterly unlike them this is, with even the ''Super-Skrull'' telling Nova he finds the modern jihadism (his words) disturbing. It's noted that Veranke's fundamentalist attitude has struck a chord with them after everything that's happened.