Atlas Came In Peace, And Actually Meant It

I mentioned it in passing yesterday, but I was pleased to see Jimmy Woo and the Atlas crew solve the problem with the Echo World without resorting to potentially lethal violence. Not that I'm necessarily opposed to the heroes killing their foes, depending on the circumstances and the hero. But Marvel (and maybe DC, I'm not sure) seems to have this attitude where killing by heroes is generally frowned upon - as long as the foe looks reasonably human (X-Force would be the obvious exception, but we're aren't supposed to see them as heroes are we?). Ms. Marvel will kill Super-Skrulls like she's in a video game. but not Norman Osborn*.

Jimmy's not immune from that himself. During Secret Invasion, he had Venus singing to Skrull soldiers to lure them into the ocean where they would drown amidst a lovestruck stupor. Venus couldn't bring herself to do it**, and while Jimmy said her understood, he then told M-11 to death ray the Skrulls instead, which M-11 did. Granted, Jimmy's looking at things from a 1950s perspective, and from the monster comics I've seen from back then, invading creatures were shown no mercy.

Then there's the inhabitants of Echo World. On the one hand, you could consider them worse than the invading Skrulls. The Skrulls were supposedly offering to share the world with Earthlings, it was just the Skrulls would be in charge. But it's not as though they were Annihilus, out to exterminate all indigenous life. The Echo Worlders don't actually want to live on Atlas' Earth, but they do try and manipulate people so that they'd kill large quantities of themselves and render portions of Earth uninhabitable, which is a bit more malicious.

At the same time, the people of Echo World have their lives constantly disrupted by these impressions or echoes of the people on the other Earths. It's not a situation they caused or asked for, and it makes their lives more difficult and terrifying, since they don't know when some ghostly looking tank is going to suddenly appear in the middle of their homes during dinner. They don't wish to conquer Earth, only to have it stop wrecking their lives on their world. You could argue the Skrulls still had it worse since they had no homeworld, but I'd think there have to be planets out there somewhere the Skrulls could settle and thrive on that aren't already inhabited. It's a big universe***, though knowing the Skrulls' luck, they'd just get settled and Galactus would show up.

It is nice to see Jimmy take that approach, and it fits, since he isn't like the past rulers of Atlas. He wasn't raised as a ruler, or a conqueror, he was raised as a regular kid who made himself into a law enforcement agent, then a secret agent. Someone whose purpose is to protect others from those who would do do them harm, rather than the person inflicting the harm (until the people agree to follow him). With the Skrulls, he handled things the way most of the previous leaders of Atlas would have. He fought the Skrulls, and killed them. So this is perhaps the point where Woo really comes into his own as leader, starts keeping his promise to Master Plan to do things his own way, rather than mimic how his predecessors handled things. And Jimmy's way is to try and help, so there's no need for conflict, rather than destroy the potential threat.

* Though I think it was her reason for not killing him that bothered me most. Namely, that she 'was better than he was'. Not that I disagree with her self-assessment, but it didn't seem like a line of reasoning she'd follow. If she had abstained from killing Osborn because she needed to get back and help her teammates, and couldn't spare the time to kill him, I'd have bought that. Or if she worried that killing Norman - a duly appointed official of the government - would make things worse for a superhero community already mistrusted by the public and the government, sure. Carol Danvers strikes me as a pragmatic sort.

** And thumbs down to Jimmy for trying to get her to do that. It's the exact sort of thing she used to do back when she was just a siren. Sure she's come to grips with her past, but that doesn't mean he should encourage her to reenact it.

*** And it would suit the Skrulls sometimes preference for sneaky. It's a sometimes preference because they prefer big splashy battles when the story dictates they stop being sneaky so the heroes can punch them a lot. Anyway, quiet, out of the way world they could rebuild on, where no one would be looking for them. As opposed to Earth, which I think every sentient species in the universe keeps one eye on, since you can never tell what those crazy Earthlings are gonna get up to.