Be Warned! Skrull Kill Krew #1-5

Written by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar
Art by Steve Yeowell and Chris Ivy

Okay, so I figured that a 90s Marvel comic about a group of shapeshifters who got their powers by eating beef tainted with dead Skrulls and use these abilities to seek out Skrulls and kill them would not be very good, even despite the fact that it was written by two of the most acclaimed comics writers of the 00's, but I had no idea it would be this bad.

Because the Skrull Kill Krew is BAD.  Really, really bad.  It's obvious when reading it that Morrison had a very limited involvement in this title.  I can see the concept being his, but there is no way that he wrote even a word of this dialogue (even if it was the first comic he ever wrote not under the influence of something).  Instead, this has Mark Millar's hands all over it, but not his usual hands, more like the ones that were recently reattached after some kind of horrible accident, before he started physiotherapy.

The book follows Ryder and Moonstomp, the founders of the Kill Krew, as they start to travel the country looking for new recruits.  I'm not sure how they found people, or how one batch of Skrull meat would travel so far before being eaten, but let's not worry about that.  Instead, let's worry about what horrible stereotypes all the characters are.  Ryder is an ex-SHIELD agent (or something) and a black activist who has Nick Fury worried (although not enough to do something).  Moonstomp is a British skinhead (who uses the word 'fagging' a lot) who is slowly turning black out of his hatred of black people.  Or something like that.  Then we get characters like Cowboy and Catwalk, who are as two-dimensional as you can imagine.

In the course of their mercifully short five issues, the Krew tangles with Hydra (and Captain America), and exterminates a town full of Skrulls, protected by the Fantastic Four (who are also Skrulls).  They kill them with guns and with their shape-shifting powers, which are apparently more formidable than the Skrulls' own abilities.

The dialogue is ridiculously bad, and not even edited to reflect the fact that the book is American (unless people in the mid-West also call phone booths 'call boxes').  The art, by the usually skilled Steve Yeowell, is rushed and horrible in all kinds of 90s ways.  Truly, this thing is a trainwreck, and I can't believe it's by the same team (minus Millar) who gave us the wonderful Sebastian O.  What I also can't believe is that Marvel brought these characters back for a bit part in the Avengers Initiative Secret Invasion chapters.  I'd have thought it would be better if all involved never admitted to this thing existing.