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