Empyre #1: We Have Met the Enemy…

When we left off, the Fantastic Four were returning from the cosmic casino of the Profiteer having “won” N’Kalla and Jo-Venn, the Skrull and Kree children who are the living embodiment of the hostility between their two species and were being used as gladiators with beings from across space battling on the outcome of their battles.  As they headed home, Earth’s greatest heroes found themselves staring down a combined armada of the Skrulls and the Kree, who have somehow found common cause and become allies.  In a scene repeated in Fantastic Four #21, Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Woman have Franklin and Valeria take the Skrull and Kree children around the armada to Earth.  Meanwhile, the FF head onward to find characters that they recognize commanding the alien flagship.  Leading both species in their assault on Earth is none other than The Hulkling of the Young Avengers, who is himself half Skrull and half Kree!  And who should be flanking him but one of The FF’s oldest adversaries, Super Skrull! 

Meanwhile, the Avengers are in that area of Earth’s Moon with the artificial atmosphere, in the Cotati garden/jungle that as a matter of history shouldn’t be there.  A reading of Avengers #133 reminds us that the Skrulls, in determining whether they should bestow their technological favors on the Kree or the Cotati, brought the Kree to our Moon and the Cotati to a distant planetoid elsewhere in space.  This glaring historical inaccuracy is one of the most conspicuous examples of bad writing I’ve seen in a Marvel comic book in many a year.  Nevertheless, there they are, inaccuracy and all, greeted by Sequoia or “Quoi,” the product of the union of the Cotati intelligence with humanity through the reanimated body of The Swordsman.  Quoi has endowed She-Hulk with a hammer-like weapon/device that reminds us of Ronan the Accuser’s Universal Weapon.  It has restored She-Hulk’s intelligence and somehow given her a less ponderous and not quite so Hulk-like figure.  This is just in time for the arrival of the alien armada. 

As you might expect, both the FF and the Avengers are startled to find a Young Avenger leading both of these species that have been so hostile to Earth.  Hulkling reveals that he called a cease-fire between the Skrulls and the Kree by his symbolic, King Arthur-like possession of a unifying sword.  Backed by the former leaders of both species, Hulkling is coming to demand the surrender of the Cotati, who the Skrulls and the Kree have named “a threat to the well-being of this galaxy.”  Captain America and Iron Man both call out Hulkling for allowing the Skrulls and Kree to use and manipulate him in a war of aggression—but Mr. Fantastic suspects there’s more going on.  And the Avengers should listen to the leader of the Fantastic Four, because as we soon see, Reed is right!  While the FF try to talk Hulkling out of it, The Avengers go on the attack, and it is ironically Hulkling who calls “Clobberin’ Time!” 

A full scale battle breaks out, in which Iron Man has Thor throw Mjolnir through the shields of the alien flagship, where it is somehow blocked by Hulkling’s sword.  But attached to the Hammer Supreme is a gadget that Shellhead has rigged up to overload the engines of all the Skrull and Kree vessels, stranding them in space, powerless.  And what follows is the reason the Avengers should have let the Fantastic Four sort this out:  for immediately the alien armada is shut down, Quoi makes his move.  This is exactly what the so-called “Celestial Messiah” wanted to happen.  At once he invokes “the Flowering.”  And exactly what is “the Flowering,” you ask?  It is the uprising of the Cotati, in which spores all over the “Green Area” of the Moon and throughout all the alien ships begin to sprout in monstrous, predatory plant-forms.  As the Cotati attack, Sequoia calls a beginning to an intergalactic war between plant life and animal life, in which he will thus claim Earth as a beachhead!