COVER BY: GABRIELLE DELL’OTTO
WRITER: BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
PENCILS: LEINIL FRANCIS YU
INKS: MARK MORALES
COLORED BY: LAURA MARTIN
LETTERED BY: CHRIS ELIOPOULOS

The final chapter in Secret Invasion picks up where issue 7 left off. The Wasp is about to explode and she sacrifices herself to save everyone else. This aggravates the heroes and villains and they mount a final offensive against the Skrulls. Wolverine is about to go in for the kill on the Skrull Queen, when Norman Osborn fires a shot that takes her head off.  Luckily for him there were news cameras everywhere that captured this.

The Skrulls at this point become completely unfocused bumbling idiots for the sake of the plot and the fact that the series needs to wrap up and are easily taken out by all of the heroes in about 2 panels. Iron Man returns to action after switching to an old school suit that has not been infected by the Skrull virus. He breaks into one Skrull ship, forces it to land and opens the hatch to reveal all of the people that had been replaced by Skrull agents. Spider-Woman, Jarvis, Elektra, Invisible Woman, Black Bolt, etc. Jessica Jones sees Jarvis and realizes that the Skrulls took her baby. She flies back to find Skrull-Jarvis and the baby MIA. This is left unresolved for now, so it appears that it may be a plot point in New Avengers for awhile. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four head back to the Baxter Building to try to bring it back from the Negative Zone and only succeed in bringing back half of it. We then cut to Thor telling off Stark and saying that he will never fight by his side again. We then move to sometime later, with Norman Osborn and the President having a press conference where the president announces the dismantling of SHIELD, the removal of all Stark Technology from government programs, the removal of Stark as the head of the Avengers and 50 state initiative and the appointment of Norman Osborn as the head of the Thunderbolts Initiative, The Avengers and the 50 state initiative. Our final scene takes us to Avengers Tower with Norman Osborn headed into a meeting and inside we see Dr. Doom, The White Queen, The Hood, The Female Loki and possibly the Sub-Mariner and says its a new day and this is how its going to be. The artwork by Yu while much better than his New Avengers work still looks blocky and hard to follow at times. The overall story by Bendis seems rushed to a conclusion. The Skrulls are supposedly this great threat that has been building this take over for years, and all it takes is killing the Queen and then they fall to pieces in the span of five minutes. The Osborn takeover of the Initiative appears to be very similar to when Lex Luthor took over the Presidency in the DCU. Overall an unsatisfying conclusion, but once again one Marvel major event spins into the next one:  Dark Reign.  It earns 3 out of 5 New Avengers.