Who do you trust? At the moment, I'm not sure I trust myself. I really, thoroughly enjoyed this book, and when I read a couple of negative reviews of it I was so taken aback I just dismissed the critiques by saying, "Oh, come on. Clearly, you decided you didn't like this before you even went into the shop to buy it. Your expectations were unmeetable. They were never gonna get a thumbs-up from you."

By that same token, though, did I like it so much just because I'd been looking forward to it and had too much emotionally invested to be disappointed? Was this, in fact, Episode I Syndrome?

I decided to reflect on it a bit, and after a full fifteen minutes I've concluded that no, it was just an entertaining book.

True, the questions that most concerned me from #1 (oh my God, Reed! Oh my God, S.W.O.R.D.! What's "Captain Marvel" doing, attacking as a Skrull or attacking a Skrull Thunderbolt?) are nowhere to be seen here. Realizing this, in a split second one either decides to be maddened and put out by it or just scoots a little closer to the edge of the seat. For the next few issues, I'm a scooter. When you get right down to it, sometimes a dinosaur rampages in like they slipped in a page from NextWave, and either you're the kind of person who says "oh, give me a break" or you're the kind of person who has to put the book down to cackle with glee like a madman.

There is no foolproof recipe for getting me to like a book, but if there were one ingredient would almost certainly be "the Sentry is immediately pantsed in a hilarious fashion and goes far, far away for the rest of the issue." I can only hope that at the Skrull boot camp, there is a poster of the Sentry in every classroom with "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BE VOID" written above it in block letters.

I found the art to be everything I like about Yu and nothing I don't. My eye was particularly caught by Spider-Skrull, who before he is killed is generally drawn as the Ditkovian creepy weirdo that most artists don't get, opting instead for the bodybuilder-in-unitard look.

I genuinely hope the author does not yank the Mockingbird out from under us halfway through the series. Her death is sort of emblematic to me of Marvel's favorite story device, the Death That Need Not Happen, and if it can be undone in a way that's not nakedly ludicrous I am all for it. It even gave us a touching character moment to boot, not to mention some complications for Clint and Echo later. I have some nagging concerns that a bunch of Skrull POWs returning to earth will leave us with a bunch of Cap-esque "man out of time" stories in a year, but in the meantime? More like this, please.