Review by Frank Plowright
Meet the Skrulls is one of those out of left field projects that Marvel issue every now and again unconnected to any event or ongoing series, just letting a creator, in this case Robbie Thompson, run with a story.
The Skrulls are an alien, shape-changing race with a long history of causing trouble in the Marvel universe, most prominently during Secret Invasion. However, their homeworld has been lost, and Thompson’s plot concerns a family of Skrulls on Earth pretending to be human and inveigling themselves with certain people in order to progress an agenda of transforming Earth into their replacement homeworld.
For Meet the Skrulls to work, it’s necessary to put aside the nagging internal voice asking why this has to be Earth, a planet that’s repelled Skrull attentions on several occasions, rather than an uninhabited planet or one that might be easier to invade. Thompson never adequately addresses that question, but he’s good with the remainder. The central point is if the Skrulls are masquerading as human and constantly interacting with humans, how far does that affect what they actually are? It’s most obvious with youngest daughter ‘Alice’, uncomfortable with the entire situation, and somewhat the outsider within her own family.
What might otherwise be a more straightforward suspenseful superhero tale is given a very different look by Nico Henrichon. He’s good with detail, layouts and atmospheric locations, and his people all have a loose, other-worldly look to them. Seeing Skrulls clothed as humans is very effective as they’re usually seen in purple jumpsuits to contrast their green skin, and when the Skrulls transform into species other than human Henrichon is very creative. However, his faces can be flat and especially in the later chapters there are some stiff poses.
Thompson pulls off a neat trick by ensuring that as everything is seen from the Skrull viewpoint there’s a form of sympathy despite the ultimate aim being global subjugation. It means the concluding events are brilliantly terrifying, although by then more has been revealed. With shape changers nothing is ever as it seems.
This is a worthwhile action thriller, and if you missed it in 2019 you could try the 2023 UK edition, which packages the title story along with the Skrulls’ first ever appearance, courtesy of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961. It’s now a piece of dated retro channelling the era’s UFO paranoia, and the ending remains audaciously great.
