El: LWiA 4.2: Skrull Kill Krew (Patreon)

The bridge from Spawn to Aztek. I may reconfigure things a bit and move some of the Marvel history from Chapter 1 to here, since this book was actually impacted by the drama at Marvel, whereas it's a secondary point to Moore's Image work. Also, it'd even out the length of the chapters a bit, which is probably nice—rough parity between the two writers on their first chapters seems desirable. But that won't result in any substantive new content—just some new joins between sections.

But I'm done with this chapter, and will get started tomorrow on rereading From Hell and figuring out how I'm going to structure that chapter. That, obviously, is going to be a pretty big lift, and so it may not be until well into July that I'm actually producing wordcount on it. But I'm hype as fuck for it.

OK. Skrull time.

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This practice would take Morrison to relatively unlikely places, perhaps most notably the comparatively Brit-averse Marvel Comics, where he and Millar penned a five issue series called Skrull Kill Krew—the only work Morrison would do for the company in the 20th century. Indeed, Morrison adopted the interesting promotional strategy of leaning into this in interviews, noting that “it’s just so beyond the pale to work for Marvel we thought it was a really funny idea. Because you shouldn’t do it. I mean, they fucked over Jack Kirby and did all these terrible things to people, so we’re working for them now.” 

The project was commissioned by Tom Brevoort, a then-neophyte editor making his first commission of a new project. As Brevoort tells it, “a blind fax came across the transom from Mark Millar and Grant Morrison. It simply stated who they were, and that they were looking for opportunities at Marvel.” Brevoort, a fan of Morrison, grabbed the fax and reached out. As Brevoort was a low-ranking editor he lacked the ability to offer them any of the major characters (this was during the failed Marvelution period in which individual editors were pathologically jealous with their character portfolios), Morrion and Millar were advised to come up with a new concept.

Their resultant book was initially called Skrull Kill Kult, a riff on industrial band My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, but Marvel rejected this on the specious grounds that it would read as an endorsement of murder cults, resulting in the new title. The Skrulls—a race of goblin-like shapeshifting aliens—were a longstanding menace within the Marvel Universe, and Morrison and Millar’s pitch reached back to their first appearance in Fantastic Four #2 back in 1961. That comic ended with the trio of Skrulls that had been impersonating the Fantastic Four being ordered to shapeshift into cows, at which point Mister Fantastic hypnotizes them to forget that they were Skrulls, allowing them to live out the rest of their lives as grazing cows. 

Morrison and Millar’s pitch was that these Skrull-cows had eventually ended up in a slaughterhouse, and that Skrull meat entered the American food supply, where it gave everyone who ate it a brain-eating virus that would kill them in two years, but would give them superpowers until then. This was a very “ripped from the headlines” sort of move, riffing on the myriad of news stories about mad cow disease. This was a lurid tabloid name for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disease typically affecting elderly populations, but that had started popping up in the UK among younger people and, tellingly, cattle farmers. The reason turned out to be interspecies transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a condition first identified in British cattle in 1989.

Mad cow disease was what’s known as a prion disease—an infection transmitted by a misfolded protein in the nervous system that begins replicating in the host. This class of disease is incurable and fatal—after an incubation period the malformed proteins simply take over, breaking down the correct protons and precipitating the breakdown of the nervous system. They are oddly terrifying for their rarity, a product not merely of their incurable fatality but of the horrifying rapid onset dementia that they cause and the often jarringly disturbing symptoms they produce—one prion disease is literally called “fatal insomnia,” and does what it says on the tin. But they form an oddly potent metaphor for the larger situation Morrison found themself in: a strangely misshapen, twisted version of a thing that, once taken in, insidiously eats away at the very foundations of one’s self.

Skrull Kill Krew, in any case, followed a group of infected humans who, in another victory for descriptive naming, hunt and kill Skrulls in retaliation. This was, to be sure, not a highly nuanced premise; as Morrison put it, “we just desperately wanted to do something that was just people running around shooting each other.” Brevoort took a somewhat more diplomatic read on it, describing it as “a very 2000 AD sort of idea: part parody, part over-the-top action/adventure comic.” And the 2000 AD roots were surely there, most obviously in the decision to mirror Zenith’s team of Steve Yeowell on art and Brendan McCarthy doing the underlying design work. But the more substantive comparison is to Morrison and Millar’s Summer Offensive project, and not only because Yeowell had worked on that as well, drawing Mark Millar’s similarly ultraviolent Maniac 5.

No, the real comparison is in many ways the most odious element of the Summer Offensive, Morrison and Millar’s edgelording Big Dave. Nothing in Skrull Kill Krew came anywhere close to that comic’s innumerable nadirs, and the comic certainly isn’t exclusively focused on being in as poor taste as possible, but it’s nevertheless clear throughout that Skrull Kill Krew is invested in a puerile rebelliousness. The first issue’s cover features a terrified Skrull being held down by a boot as a gun is pointed down at his head. The caption hypes “Buy this book… or we shoot this Skrull!,” with the “or” struck through and replaced with a spraypainted “AND.” The second, meanwhile, proclaims that it’s guest starring Captain America “whether he likes it or not,” while the fourth, in a parody of Fantastic Four’s traditional tagline as “the world’s greatest comic magazine,” proclaims itself “the world’s most hateful comic magazine.”

This tone is established immediately in the comic itself as well. The first scene opens with a high school history teacher lecturing about FDR’s policies around hydroelectric power before the door to her classroom is kicked in by a skinhead who proclaims that “life’s just too faggin’ short to waste your time reading about some bloke nobody’s ever heard of” before he and his Black dreadlocked companion gun the teacher down, revealing her to be a Skrull. 

Other characters are soon introduced, including the viewpoint character, Rob Fortune, who becomes Dice, a character whose superpowers are determined by a slot machine graphic on his forehead, along with the self-absorbed supermodel Catwalk and the angry punk Riot, who Morrison describes as “this spunky New York woman who wants to be a lesbian but doesn’t have the balls. She irritates everybody.” But these initial two characters prove an effective summary of the book’s aesthetic vision: Skrull Kill Krew is the sort of book that’s exceedingly pleased with its clever idea of pairing an imposing Black man with a racist skinhead. Morrison and Millar inevitably lean on this odd couple relationship with things like a scene where Moonstomp, convulsing because of the brain-eating virus, begins having patches of dark skin appear on his face. As Ryder explains it, “my white supremacist friend here has a virus which is feeding on the anger in his body and turning him into what he hates most. Namely negroes.” Ryder proceeds to taunt Moonstomp, who angrily tells him to “shag off, chocolate drop” and calls him a “big black poofter.” 

That all of this, along with the use of “faggin’” as a replacement swear word, was perfectly allowable by Marvel while a My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult reference was deemed scandalous says much about Marvel Comics in the mid-90s. But it says far more about Morrison and Millar, and the degree to which their aesthetic was simply one of mean-spirited witlessness for the sake of it. Skrull Kill Krew aims for offensiveness, but in practice only hits a cringeworthy immaturity—a book that seems to be actively trying to be bad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it folded after five issues.