SKRULL KILL KREW

Mark Millar and Grant Morrison. Illustrated by Steve Yeowell
5 issues
(Marvel Edge)

Reviewed by Adam Ford

You get super-powers if you eat hamburgers made out of green-skinned pointy-eared aliens called Skrulls. Well, if a radioactive spider doesn't give you cancer and cosmic rays don't cook you like a microwave pot roast, it's not that odd an assertion...

The premise of this short-lived series was kind of basic: five people acquire the ability to change their shape after eating hamburgers made from contaminated beef; more specifically, beef made from cows that weren't really cows, but were instead shape-changing aliens called Skrulls who had been hypnotised into changing into cows and thinking that they really were cows. The shape-changers band together in order to expose the world-wide conspiracy that involves the aforementioned Skrulls (but not the ones that became cows, obviously) infiltrating human society. It's a plot that bears a strong resemblance to the sci-fi B-movie They Live, in which a man discovers a box of magic sunglasses that reveal every second person on the planet to be a member of an alien race that has covertly enslaved our planet.

The five-person team of Skrull killers is comprised of members of five distinct subcultures: Ryder, the leader, is a dreadlocked black-power dude; Moonstomp is a straight-edge skinhead; Dice is a goatee-wearing surfer; Riot is a spiky pink-haired punk; and Catwalk is a supermodel. Presumably the separate cultural identities of the team members was intended to illustrate the oddness of such a group.

The premise of Skrull Kill Krew is a perfect example of the kind of idea-mining that Grant Morrison gets up to when he turns his attention to the comics produced by Marvel and the "history" of the "universe" that the stories produced by Marvel Comics take place in. The skrulls/cows that the four Skrull Killers ate to acquire their powers are actually the villains from one of the very first Fantastic Four comics. The solution to leave the aliens transformed into cows in a sunny meadow was always one that left me unsatisfied as a child, and it seems to have been the same for Morrison and Millar. Their dissatisfaction prompted them to pen this ridiculous romp of a hack-and-slash shoot-'em-up road trip story which lasted a whole five issues before being cancelled.

In the five issues that they managed to get out before cancellation, the SKK go head-to-head with Captain America, an evil army of pseudo-Nazis, a fake Fantastic Four and an entire small town populated by Skrulls. By the end of issue five the bodycount is well over five-hundred, with the Skrulls coming out on the losing side. I dare say that cancellation barely even registered with Millar and Morrison - the whole thing reads like something they threw together over a couple of pints one night. Five issues is most likely five more than they figured they¹d get out of it, so by that criteria this comic could be seen as some kind of success. Overall, though, it's pretty much a no-brainer of a scenario: find some Skrulls, massacre them, find some more Skrulls, massacre them and repeat until fade. If anything this series does point out that the Skrulls are one of the dumbest alien menaces ever to appear in comics, with their stupid little purple skull-caps lodged between their pointy ears, their corrugated chins and the fact that this huge conspiratorial invasion force can be so utterly devastated by five dickheads with a tendency to make Schwarzenegger-esque puns as they blow their victims away.

An interesting side-note is that at one stage Morrison claimed that SKK was part of a trilogy of his works that all held together thematically, the other two works being Kill Your Boyfriend and the Invisibles series (see respective reviews in this ProFile). Hard to tell if the man was joking or not - outside some superficial resemblences, there's little similarity between this series and Morrison's more creatively successful, more well-thought-out work.

Recommended for the morbidly curious if they can find it for under a buck an issue.

adam ford lives in melbourne, australia, and works as a freelance editor and journalist. he's a published poet and an aspiring comic writer. at one time or another he has been responsible for at least three literary journals, and has performed his poetry at galleries, schools and pubs all over australia. he's just learned how to make his own pasta.

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