Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #367: The Skrull Kill Krew

The Silver Age of Comics is known for, among other things, tossing any weird idea at the wall and seeing if it would stick.  Comics were mostly read by kids, and they didn’t have the sort of knowledge that adults readers might of the world around them, so crazier ideas were more likely to appear and no one worried too much about it.  Take what happened to some Skrull agents in their first appearance in the pages of Fantastic Four.  They were hypnotized into thinking they were cows.

It got weirder from there, hence the Skrull Kill Krew.

Now, my own recollections says those Skrulls later caused problems for the Avengers, but the basic premise behind the Skrull Kill Krew is that, as some point, the hypnotized Skrulls were turned into hamburgers and fed to people, many of whom got sick and many more of whom died of said sickness.

Meanwhile, let’s have a moment of silence for the existential horror that is sentient lifeforms like the Skrulls becoming Big Macs.

Regardless, some of the people who contracted the disease got better, but then they had Skrull-ish superpowers.  That was the premise of Skrull Kill Krew, a mini-series or two that started up in 1995 where a group of those survivors got together to kill them some Skrulls.  Some of them eventually felt remorse over that, but that may be before their heads fell off.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  The Skrull Kill Krew had one mission, namely to kill Skrulls that, fortunately, always seemed to be up to no good.  Should I be surprised that something this odd could come from the minds of writers Grant Morrison and Mark MIllar? I mean, artist Steve Yeowell was there too, so he might have helped with the nutty that was this idea.

Regardless, the Kill Krew’s original line-up was as follows:

• Ryder, the leader, who had superhuman strength, could teleport, and taught the others telepathy.  He did a lot of stretchy things and often had his hair acting like tentacles.
• Riot, AKA Heidi Sladkin, a punk rocker who could transform into a monstrous insectoid form, but then she often got stuck that way.
• Catwalk, AKA Kimberly Dee, a model who could turn into a cat monster.
• Dice, AKA Rob Fortune, a laid-back surfer type who could breathe underwater and fashion weapons, but then he started phasing through stuff because he claimed he accepted a new reality.
• Moonstomp, real name unknown, a skinhead Neo-Nazi who preferred to just bash Skrulls in with a claw hammer, and later on his skin started to turn, well, brown.

Now, going around and killing Skrulls also means that they ran afoul or other Marvel characters, but in the end, well…Catwalk, Dice, and Moonstomp’s heads fell off because the infection was rotting away the rest of their bodies and Ryder put their heads in storage so they could go on one last mission.

That aforementioned last mission did eventually happen during the Secret Invasion.  Ryder and Riot went into the Avengers Initiative to flush out the Skrulls and found help from former Avenger and former Triathlon the 3-D Man.  That mission ended with Dice, Moonstomp, and Catwalk all dying when their heads fell off a second time, Riot reverting to human form and dying, and Ryder and 3-D Man going off to kill more Skrulls.

That said, Riot apparently got better, as did Moonstromp, though he quit the team when he remembered that as a huge racist, it didn’t sit too well with him to be allied with a black man like Ryder…who may or may not have been an actual Skrull but couldn’t remember that.

So, that was the Skrull Kill Krew.  They killed Skrulls.

That said, there was apparently a Skrull that was made to think he was a duck instead of a cow, and that one was eaten by one Tara Tam.  She did turn into some kind of duck creature, but she declined to join the Krew and instead partnered up with Howard the Duck.

Huh.  I wonder why I haven’t done an entry on Howard the Duck yet…