Inside the secrets and lies of Marvel Comics' Secret Invasion with its creator Brian Michael Bendis

It was 2008, and Brian Michael Bendis was keeping a secret. For the past four years, the writer behind Marvel Comics’ top-selling Avengers franchise – and then-Marvl-editor-in-chief Joe Quesada’s choice for, in his word, “MVP” among the company’s writers – had been hiding sleeper agents in plain sight among Marvel’s heroes. From the moment he took the helm on Marvel’s flagship title, Bendis, with the willing collaboration of his editors, had substituted a select group of key characters with shapeshifting Skrulls: the better to reveal them, with a shocking lack of advance warning, almost half a decade later.

The result was 2008’s Secret Invasion, an event series written by Bendis and drawn by Leniel Francis Yu with the scratchy, moody atmosphere of a '1970’s'70s conspiracy thriller, which imagined the central premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers transplanted into the superheroic Marvel Universe. Coming a year after the mammoth sales of the Civil War miniseries, at the apex of the era of event-driven summer crossovers, Secret Invasion arrived at a moment when fan interest, editorial experience, and a thriving online comic book culture were combining into a heady brew of pop culture.

And from the moment the series hit the shelves, it inspired an almost equal measure of sales, enthusiasm, and furious controversy. First, because of its capacity to inspire first obsessive speculation and then appalled response as to the identity of the hidden Skrulls. Second, because of its shock ending, which saw the villainous Norman Osborn (better know to readers as Spider-Man foe the Green Goblin) delivering the final shot to defeat the Skrull invaders, and becoming embraced as a hero and political leader by the American public.

And third, not least, because the story’s political overtones (which involved sleeper cells of hidden aliens walking among humans, and introduced a new element of a zealous religious faith driving Skrull militancy) seemed to draw from the language, discussions, and scandals of George W. Bush-era headlines. Nor, in the 15 years since the story’s conclusion, has that interest or controversy abated. This month, Disney+ debuted its Secret Invasion TV series, taking the same central premise, and setting it in the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – albeit updated with some additional modern flavor.

The time therefore seemed right to sit down with Brian Michael Bendis to revisit the planning, politics, and retrospective legacy of one of his hallmark story arcs. Bendis’s reflections were candid, revealing, and sometimes surprising: a decade and a half on, the writer has few secrets left to keep.

Popverse: Brian, Secret Invasion was one of the earliest ideas you had when you first took over the Avengers series in 2005. Can you talk about some of the influences you were drawing from for the story?

Brian Michael Bendis: I had gone to a