This is an unusually quiet week.  Unless you like the Secret Invasion crossover, in which case it's a stupidly busy week. 

Not so long ago, I used to complain all the time about Marvel's erratic scheduling of the X-books.  Thankfully, they've largely brought that under control.  But this week sees the release of not only Secret Invasion #5, but also five tie-in books - Secret Invasion: X-Men #1, Secret Invasion: Inhumans #1, Secret Invasion: Thor #1, Secret Invasion: Runaways / Young Avengers #2 and Captain Britain & MI-13 #4.  If there's a sensible reason for doing things this way, it eludes me.

The list also illustrates Marvel's current strategy with crossovers.  As with World War Hulk, the bigger titles aren't crossing over directly, but contributing a spin-off mini.  The Avengers titles are an exception, but justifiably so, because the crossover is based on their storylines.  Otherwise, the participating titles tend to be second and third tier books that could use the help.

The X-Men are way too important to have the crossover in their main book, so instead we have Mike Carey and Cary Nord contributing a four-issue miniseries.  It's also billed as a "Manifest Destiny" title, but like "Divided We Stand", this seems to mean little more than "It's in continuity."  I'm not quite sure what they're trying to achieve with this half-hearted promotion; in another similarity to the previous arc, "Manifest Destiny" has a little logo to put on covers, but it's small to the point of invisibility.  (It's that little smudge under X-23's elbow, just above the bar code.)

Anyway.  Can you guess what the plot is?  That's right.  The Skrulls are invading San Francisco, and so they have to fight the X-Men, who are the local heroes.  Cue the punchy punchy.

Most Secret Invasion tie-ins have focussed on the paranoia angle.  After all, as the B-movie logo makes clear, this story is basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Skrulls and superheroes.  But there are an awful lot of tie-ins to this storyline.  And let's be honest: "one of the cast might be a Skrull" is a good idea for a story, but it's not a good idea for seventeen stories at once.

Perhaps anticipating that the paranoia angle will be oversubscribed, Carey has taken a different line.  There's no suggestion here that the X-Men have been infiltrated.  On the contrary, the Skrulls weren't even expecting them to be in the city.  Instead, Carey has opted to play up the religion angle, with a subplot about a Skrull religious artefact falling into Nightcrawler's hands.

Carey also takes the opportunity to reveal some of the characters who end up in San Francisco.  This is technically a spoiler, but it's probably intentional.  Merely throwing in cameos by Prodigy, Mercury and the Stepford Cuckoos, all of whom seemed to have been written out, gives fans something to speculate on (and suggests that the cast of Young X-Men is likely to settle down to something more familiar, sooner rather than later).

But basically, it's an extended fight scene with a bit of window dressing to hold the interest of X-Men fans.  It knows it's a summer crossover and it's not trying to convince you of anything else.  On the face of it, it's completely peripheral to both the X-books and Secret Invasion, but if you want another story about superheroes fighting alien invaders, this is a perfectly fine version of the theme. 

Rating: B

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