Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.