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The story is fine, but not much more than that. It has some good moments -- Emma Frost is her usual stiff upper lip awesome, there's some nice moral qualm issues between Beast and Cyclops, and the Skrulls get to be scary and honourable warriors simultaneously -- but overall, it feels like a bit of a slugfest without much actually going on. I also find it very disappointing that during an invasion of alien shapeshifters, this miniseries doesn't have a single infiltration, spy or surprise reveal plot. (Likely, that was in itself intended to be the twist, as they do pay lip service to the characters being concerned about the possibility, but when read in isolation from the rest of the event, it feels lacklustre.) Without the shapeshifter element, this just is fighting alien ships in the skies -- something everyone's seen a hundred times before. The comic, unfortunately, doesn't add much new to that, just delivering a decent execution of the well-worn premie.

The lack of shapeshifters might, my wife hypothesized, be why the bonus issue in the collection is 1983's 250th issue of "Fantastic Four", in which the titula group teams up with Spider-Man and Captain America to fight a secret incursion of Skrulls pretending to be the X-Men. This bonus comic reads fine -- rather dated by today's standards, and neatly wrapped up by the end, though I wish there'd be more emotion in the mistaken identities. It's very "hey ... you're not the X-Men!", no real stakes are felt during the portion where the heroes think they're fighting old friends. But oh well, it was a single issue story.

All in all, while I love the main "Secret Invasion" event, and I'm a big fan of Carey since his run on "Lucifer", this book was entertaining enough, but didn't really add much to the whole. ( )

I don't know what it is about X-men, but they often have a way of making everything very epic, it never seems to be "Villain X has a diabolical plan to rob a bank and buy himself an island", it's always more like "One of us must give up his very soul to prevent the world from being destroyed, who will it be?"

So pretty good stuff. Lots of tension and loved the Skrull "mentalist commune" or whatever it was called. ( )

The X-Men have to fight of an invasion of shape-shifting Skrulls. I liked that there were a few "main" characters that were focused on instead of giving a little bit of time to each X-man. Perhaps it because I was introduced to the Skrulls in a Deadpool graphic novel, but I just can't take them seriously as a threat to humanity. ( )

Most of the Secret Invasion tie-ins are short and simply show the event from a different POV, with little overall impact. This one is no different. However, I found it far more entertaining than I expected because it's not bogged down with the paranoia of "who can you trust?"

When the Skrull fleet descends on the US, the ships sent to San Francisco aren't expecting the X-Men. Unsurprisingly, the mutants fight back. What I found interesting was that they weren't automatically the superior fighting force. Often, the X-Men come across as so powerful that enemies present no challenge to them or the reader. Here, The Skrulls not only outnumber them, they have superskrull warriors (with stolen superhero powers of their own), and they have more advanced technology which includes resistance to mental assault by telepaths. So, the X-Men must rely on strategy, guts and guerrilla warfare to resist the invasion.

This trade has a lot of action, but also a fair number of scenes showing the opponents' responding to and orchestrating tactics. This is one of the few instances where I like Cyclops because he showed real leadership, even down to the tough decisions. Overall, I thought this tie-in was excellent despite not having an impact on the bigger picture. It wasn't essential but it was very satisfying, and demonstrated that wars are fought on many fronts. Highly recommended. ( )