Top 10 Marvel Comics Events Of All Time

7. Secret Invasion (2008)

Why it was good: If you were a race of shape-changing aliens who had always been thwarted by the inhabitants of one particular planet, would it take you decades (in fictional time) to come up with a plan to infiltrate that world in the form of some of its greatest heroes and sow mistrust? It did for the Skrulls, but when their plan came together — with a healthy dose of religious zealotry thrown in — it was a memorable one. That feeling of not knowing who was who was priceless. And while the gimmick of having some heroes replaced by Skrulls was one that could easily have been abused, Brian Michael Bendis and the writers of the tie-ins were fairly restrained at using it as an unlimited license for retcons. Bonus points too for the fact that though this had its fair share of tie-ins, you could read just the main series and get all the important plot points.

Why it didn’t rank higher: I’m a fan of Leinil Yu, but this wasn’t necessarily the best match for his talents, as some of the biggest battles were sort of muddy. It didn’t help that the Skrulls had manufactured tons of different Super-Skrulls (via the very valid device of having a bunch of captured heroes to use as fuel for experiments, but still), making some of the scraps even more confusing. A few of the twists were hard to swallow, like the Skrulls trying to make Tony Stark believe he was one of them when he really wasn’t, or the fact that these were the most difficult Skrulls to detect ever, until they weren’t. And the non-death of the Wasp ended up kind of pointless.

How it had lasting effects: Well, it led to the dissolution of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its replacement by H.A.M.M.E.R. Someone ended up thinking it would be a good idea to put Norman Osborn in charge too, and we all saw how that turned out, but not until we got a few more events out of it. In a way, you could call Secret Invasion the precursor of what you saw with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. during 2014. It’s HYDRA instead of aliens, but the core concept of S.H.I.E.L.D. being infiltrated and turning into something that needed to be tossed out before it could be rebuilt? You saw it here first.