The Invaders - Heroes Assembled!

I was out of the new comic book game when this limited series hit the shelves. I'd just stopped reading The Avengers after decades of dedicated following and I was frankly loathe to contradict my resolve to stay off the new stuff so soon after going cold turkey. And Dynamite was involved and that company has rarely failed to let me down.

So despite being a recently reformed Avengers fan and a longtime devotee of The Invaders, I let Avengers-Invaders one lay. Then some years later I found the wildly overprice collected edition for relatively small money, and having several years off the new comics at that point took a chance on it. I read it quickly, forgot and moved on.

But as part of my recent binge of Invaders material I found it and thought it a good time to give it another read and see if it fit into the broader context more effectively than my limited memory suggested. It did, and I liked it better this time.

The story like so many comic yarns is at once simple and complicated, and maybe even a bit complex. The Invaders along with some plain old G.I.s attack a castle in Italy near the end of World War II and suddenly a mysterious fog appears and the team plus one soldier are transported out of their time into the present day where they find The Thunderbolts and think they are still fighting Nazis. The battle rages and the T-Bolts are defeated as word of Captain America's return to the living gets out.

The Avengers at this time are embroiled in a mighty conflict between teams as Iron Man leads a group bent on capturing the renegade Avengers led by Luke Cage among others. The Invaders are thrown into this mix as Tony Stark realizes this time-lost team must be contained and returned to their original time before havoc erupts.

But the Invaders get split up and Namor confronts his older, somewhat more sanguine self as he attempts to raise an army in Atlantis. The Human Torch discovers the Life Model Decoys used by SHIELD and imagines he's found kindred spirits. Bucky is at a loss as is Toro as both boys must confront their mortality. Everyone is fascinated by the return of Captain America, and see his return as a turning point.

But the lust for battle gets the best of everyone and its difficult to keep the peace in a world filled up with so many energetic super types. The Human Torch leads an uprising of the LMDs who seem to have an agenda of their own. Namor is rebuffed by the Atlanteans who after long decades have a less provocative stance ont he surface world.

They eventually learn that the Cosmic Cube is the root of the problem, but the secret of who is operating it is one they think they know. They are wrong.

The story quickly becomes one about regret as The Invaders have to increasingly face up their own mortality. The various Avengers to varying degrees try to keep the future info under wraps but the desire to change the tragedies of the past are difficult to suppress.

A hidden enemy is revealed, a few of them in fact and the battle of course continues to rage between the teams as well as between the heroes and the villains.

All the Invaders have to confront their inner demons and finally are able to work together to overcome the threat which has sought to make use of them since they landed in the modern world. They seek to return, but again the desire to improve the past proves problematic.

The Red Skull gets his hands on the Cosmic Cube and changes the world to reflect his own mad image of a Nazi paradise on Earth. Needless to say most of us would not agree that he's got a firm handle on what makes for a great society.

Heroes battle and heroes live and die and the struggle to return the world to its pre-Skull reality proves to be the only mission which matters. The Avengers who find themselves in this wacked version of the post World War II reality hide themselves behind the guises of then-know superheroes.

But secrets are revealed and classic villains emerge to battle the assembled team which eventually includes many Golden Age luminaries, as they try to stop the Red Skull's mad scheme to control the world.

It's not much of a revelation to say they succeed, but there is a cost and there are consequences which last beyond the parameters of this one expansive storyline.

Now to put this into perspective. The weakest aspect of this story is The Avengers. The Assemblers are far from their classic model in this storyline, coming as it did when the teams were largely shambles. With the editorial decision to jam heroes like Wolverine and Spider-Man onto the teams (a sales decision I understand) the distinctiveness of The Avengers  is lost. It was one of the reasons I left new comics behind to begin with. The Avengers became everyone, so in a sense they became no one.

So it's a wildly complex Avengers world the Invaders find themselves in. So complex that frankly there's little room for the story to breathe effectively. The story very much improves when the scene is shifted away from the modern world and put into a war setting. We get a limited number of Avengers who match up well with the Invaders giving everyone a chance to shine.

Jim Krueger always writes an intriguing story, which often finds neat little insights into the motivations of characters. When that stuff works its clever and fresh, but sometimes it seems a bit forced. I never bought The Human Torch's affinity for the LMD community and when that relationship is shown to be at least a bit fraudulent it feels a bit like a red herring in a story which is already full of a gaggle of moving parts.

The storytelling does a smart thing to keep the focus on the sidekicks Bucky and Toro for much of the saga and more of that would've been perhaps more effective. There's an everyman soldier in the story who proves to be crucial to the plot, but he seems extraneous for much of the tale and his place could've been taken by someone else, as the theme of regret seems well distributed.

This is hard read, especially at the beginning where gathering the threads together requires quite a bit of work. But it does gather momentum, especially in the final quarter and ends with a really nice coup for future storytelling.

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Avengers & Invaders!

When this epic first dropped onto the stands, it was a time of transition for me a comic book reader. After long decades, I was leaving the mainstream Marvel Universe behind and that included the Avengers. So despite a story starring the Avengers (composed of characters I didn't really care for at the time) and all-time faves The Invaders I passed.


I did pick up the neat reprint volume that came out at the time out of affection for Sal Buscema's great artwork.

When the story came out in trade I was tempted again but the thirty-five dollar price point had a shade of sticker shock to it. Also I'm not a fan of Dynamite Comics which has way too many alternate covers of questionable merit for my tastes.

I do love Alex Ross and he and longtime partner Jim Krueger were the heavyweights behind this. Krueger can write an intriguing story for sure. The covers were magnificent, at least the main ones were. The interior artwork by Stephen Sadowski was pretty good, though he was replaced by another artist I'm unfamiliar with and one who was much weaker.

I found the collection for reasonable money at Half-Price Books and took a tumble. I just finished reading it and after the beautiful cover gallery below, I'll have a spoiler-laden review.













The story begins strong told from Bucky's perspective, though I personally had a very hard time reading the font they used to mimic Bucky's handwriting. That made getting up to tempo on the reading difficult in the worst place for that to be the case.

The story follows the core Invaders team as they are whisked into a green mist alongside a G.I. to the modern day to confront the Avengers pretty quickly thereafter. Captain America is still dead when this story was originally told, so seeing Cap returned proves to be a blockbuster for many of the characters.


The Invaders think they are inside some sort of bizarre Nazi plot and fight tooth and nail against both teams of Avengers and against SHIELD which shows up to take them into custody.

I liked Subby's sojourn to find his own people only to have to confront an elder version of himself. It was pretty keen the way they dismissed as just another of Namor's crazy bastard kids.

I was at first confused by the Human Torch's mumblings about the plight of the LMD's but then when it was all revealed to be a scheme by Ultron even that plot element jelled for me. That's a staple of Krueger's work, a sense that things are very confusing then arriving at an "aha" moment which is worth the work.

It became increasingly clear that this was Bucky's story, and having him meet himself, then the new Captain America was poignant, especially the call by the former Winter Soldier to his younger self to save himself from Zemo's rocket.

And Toro too became of interest, and I'll admit that flipping through the book and finding that I might've seen him resurrected in the modern world was a pull to finally read this story. The death of Toro all those years ago in the Sub-Mariner comic is a favorite story and I wanted to read this potential coda to that classic.


The soldier who goes into the future with the Invaders plays a key role and I guess he's supposed to give us the everyman perspective on superheroes which seems a requirement of stories these days, but I never connected with this character and found him more than a bit annoying.

Learning that there was a connection between the original Vision and the Cosmic Cube was cleverly done and again a classic Krueger move. This kind revision of backstory is a neat thing he does and he almost always makes it make sense.

The story's shift to the WWII setting is when it really gets going and I loved the way the Avengers pretend to be Golden Age heroes. This final arc of the story really was outstanding and had an old-fashioned bang-up quality to it. It needed to have begun a few issues sooner and I think the story would've held up better for me. The teams tumble around on the Helicarrier a bit too long for my tastes.

A really good story. It's clearly an Invaders story with the Avengers being the "guest stars" but you can't tell that from the logo which obscures the "Invaders" name on most the covers. They seem to want to market this as a stealth Avengers book. It's the Invaders which got me to buy it at last. I'm very glad I did.

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