Now, New Avengers revealed Jessica Drew as the Skrull queen.
BENDIS: Well, we teased it in New Avengers #41, which I thought was a lot of fun for people who are always worried about tie-ins. We had some good juicy stuff in the tie-ins, but still you're not sure Jessica Drew is or isn't. Then right away here we go, "Ha ha ha! She is." Not only is she a Skrull, she's the queen. She's the leader of the group. She's a leader who actually put herself in the most precarious position for the good of her people.
She even takes out Echo without hesitation.
BENDIS: Yep. Poor Echo. She didn't hear that coming... Sorry.
[Laughs] That's terrible.
BENDIS: I know.
This is one of those moments people have been both anticipating and dreading.
BENDIS: Including Tom Brevoort. These reveals, we think about them a lot. You don't want to do the "Ha ha!" every ten pages. We talked about that in the first issue commentary. If every Skrull reveal is a similar beat, it would be boring. It's literally like hearing the same joke over and over again. I have a 5-year-old who, if she tells a joke and gets a laugh, will tell the joke over and over and over again—not understanding the diminishing return no matter how cute she is. Even the way we reveal Spider-Woman is so completely different than how we reveal Jarvis or Dum Dum. In the traditional Marvel sense, you'd turn to the last page and she'd go "Because I am the queen! Hahaha! To be continued." There's nothing wrong with that, but I thought that's what you'd expect. So, even after she kills Echo, you think, "Wait. What? Are you saying what I think you're saying?" It's more, I think, realistic and more of a slow burn. No one actually goes all this way and then announces themselves. We get the sense that something is wrong here. Then she comes into the scene and here's fluish Tony Stark desperately trying to do whatever it is he's doing. There is a little air of sexualization to it. It really is about intimacy. She comes up to him in a very intimate way, and describes everything not in a sneering way. She loves him and expresses it in an intimate way very clearly. Note that the body language is completely different than it was before. Even in the earlier scenes (from New Avengers) when she brings him the body of the Skrull Elektra and with all the other interactions they've had prior to this, it's very official, very business-like—even in the most intimate and quiet moments. Now all the guard is down and all the acting is over, and this is the real relationship as far as she's concerned.
What's going through Tony's mind? You know back there somewhere he's been thinking about this moment.
BENDIS: Well, he's hungry. They haven't eaten in a couple days. No. You have to remember that he's got, like, the flu. The Skrulls attacked him physically, and he's desperately trying to hold on. Then here comes this information that makes a lot of sense. There's some logic there. It's a bit unbelievable, but there's your close confidant telling this to you. You don't know what to believe. "It makes sense. That's why Cap's dead. Oh my god."
Was this a beat you knew from the beginning you just had to have?
BENDIS: Yup. It was in the pitch. I didn't sneak it in at the end. That was one of those beats that as Civil War was rolling along and Tony became a polarizing character in the Marvel Universe, it became…it was just like, "This is great. This is fantastic. It's selling itself." It's an eye-opener. It's a whopper. You feel bad on one level, but now you can go back and read all your Iron Man things and see all the sh— he did.
This scene with the eye sequence, what were you picturing in your head when you came up with that panel progression?
BENDIS: You ever see Martin Scorsese's "Cape Fear?" That's what I was doing. [Laughs] The character looks right at the reader and almost begs them to help. The camera zooms in almost impossibly close on their eyes. It happens many times in the movie. Alfred Hitchcock did it, too, but "Cape Fear" is what I was thinking of because Scorsese talked about how it's almost breaking the fourth wall. It's not quite, but it literally is Tony looking at the reader begging for help and understanding that you just don't have to give him. So, you're both in it together in a way. When another human being comes to you and begs you for something, whether you can or can't or choose not to, you are involved.
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