The series was a collaboration between writer Christos Gage and cover artist Alex Ross, who share a "story" credit, and artist Caio Reis. Interestingly, the cover bears the logos for both Marvel and Dynamite Entertainment, and the credits page lists five folks from Dynamite. This, despite the fact that all of the characters are, of course, Marvel characters. At this remove, I couldn't even guess why Dynamite would be involved in a series like this; was Ross perhaps under some kind of contract with the publisher that necessitated their involvement...?
The stars are, of course, The Invaders, a Golden Age super-team retconned into Marvel Universe history by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema in a 1969 Avengers story. Though some of the characters shared covers and occasionally crossed over—especially in regards to Namor and The Human Torch— in various Timely comics, they never really operated as a team during the war years. These days, they are basically Marvel's answer to DC's Justice Society of America.
For this particular series, Ross and Gage have essentially reassembled the 1970s line-up, and added the Golden Age Vision, who functions as much as a plot device as a character. Of course, it picks up those various characters where they were in the Marvel Universe circa 2010, and so Bucky is serving as the "official" Captain America, Steve Rogers has a new, maskless costume and is the leader of SHIELD, The Torch and Toro are recently-ish resurrected, Namor is hanging out with the X-Men on Utopia and Union Jack is the Joseph Chapman version.
The story is pretty straightforward. There's a bizarre, terrifying attack at a hospital in the Netherlands, wherein a muscular, badly deformed man stumbles in seeking aid, and then attacks with what seems like super-stength and rage, his bite infecting others and transforming them into creatures like himself. Somewhat zombie-ish then, although the victims look a bit more like Hulked-out versions of Quasimodo than the undead.
Shown footage of the incident, Steve Roges, serving as Boss of All Super-Heroes, folds his hands and says, "I know what this is." Just as he's in the midst of ordering Maria Hill to alert various heroes, The Golden Age Vision and the other characters from the cover appear, Vision declaring, "Only The INVADERS can save this world now," the team's name appearing in a giant, stylized font as it does on the cover. (Though this Vision is an extra-dimensional alien rather than an android, his yellow-colored dialogue balloons are square in shape, with rigidly straight lines connecting them, which visually suggests a mechanical nature to his voice.)
We then get a series of flashbacks, showing Vision as he gathers the others in groups of two—the fact that the various Invaders were spending time with one another at this point of crisis, he intimates, was no coincidence, but part of the pull of a magical force being marshalled against them).
And then a more substantial flashback, revealing the truth behind a bombshell Steve drops at the end of the first issue.
"She's talking about the darkest chapter in our history," Steve says of something that Spitfire breaks up while recalling, "...WHEN THE INVADERS MURDERED A TOWN FULL OF INNOCENT PEOPLE."
Pretty strong cliffhanger, right?
As for that story, it takes places in the Netherlands in 1945, wherein The Invaders were battling "the full roster of the Uberkommando", all of Hitler's superhumans: Master Man, U-Man, Baron Blood and Warrior Woman. The Nazi super-people are defending a nearby castle containing the laboratory of Arnim Zola, who was, at that particular point, still entirely human.
In that lab, he had cooked up weaponized disease glimpsed at the beginning of the first issue, the thing that turns civilians into deformed, muscular killer monsters and drives the to bite others, spreading the disease zombie apocalypse style.
Once they learn that there is absolutely no cure, and that the disease causes incredibly pain for those suffering from it, the heroes make a terrible judgement call, one that the original Union Jack refused to be a part of, even if he also said he wouldn't try to stop them from implementing it: The Invaders kill all of the infected civilians, burning down their village and flooding the whole area.
And now these same characters (with a new Union Jack in for the old) are forced to face that situation again, as the infection seems to have resurfaced and, when they return to the town, they see it magically being rebuilt and find themselves facing the new iteration of the team of super-Nazis they fought during the war (Master Man, Warrior Woman and U-Man all seem to still be around, and are here joined by a huge robot battle-suit going by the name Iron Cross and two identical skinheads in matching shirts with swastikas on them; I didn't catch their names).
So, what exactly is going on?
Well, the villain is revealed to be a survivor of the town, one whose infection resulted in his being deformed, but not becoming a mindless killer like the others. He blamed the Invaders for the deaths of his family, and has spent his life studying the occult, trying to find a way to bring his family back to life...and hating these heroes the whole time.
It certainly didn't help that almost all of the Invaders have, one way or another, not only survived the war, but also cheated death and lived, young and vital as ever, into the 21st century. Hell, several of them have literally died and been resurrected through extraordinary means. (It must be unusual for those who lose a loved one to regard death in the Marvel Universe, where there are so many famous examples of people returning from the dead, and almost as many different ways to achieve those resurrections; one imagines the loss lacks the finality that it does here in our universe.)
Using his occult knowledge and the Spear of Destiny, the vengeful old man has summoned a Lovecraftian deity associated with the area (the word "fhtagn" is repeated a lot) and attempts to trade the Invaders' lives for those of the townspeople...a bargain the Invaders themselves seem willing to make, to his own surprise. (Two quick points of interest. First, when the magic-user holds aloft the Spear, he says that it was "lost during the closing days of the war," and an editorial note points readers to 2010's WWII-set one-shot The Twelve: Spearhead, completely ignoring the fact that a kid lifted it from a German museum during the events of 1994's Wolverine: Evilution; this is Evilution erasure! Second, that Lovecraftian entity, a one-eyed ball of tentacles, is Shua-Gorath; I didn't recognize it as a pre-existent character the first time I read this, but now recognize it from the film Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.)
Naturally, despite long odds and the surprise appearance of the now weird-looking, robot-bodied Zola, the heroes end up saving the day, defeating the various villains and even providing a cure to the new crop of infected victims, something they were unable to do in 1945, back before they had the likes of super-scientists like Reed Richards and Hank Pym in their contact lists.
The story is fairly simple, and of the plot-over-character variety, but it is quite well-told, moving quite swiftly through pages with very few panels on them and driven by some particularly hooky cliffhangers. Despite Ross' predictably realistic covers, the interior art occasionally leaves something to be desired.
Reis' art is fine so long as it involves super-people in costumes posing, of which there is a fair amount here, but he's much less able to sell the scenes of various civilians, even when it involves our heroes out of costume. I'm not quite sure about his female figures, either. Spitfire, who wears a full-body yellow suit with little ornamentation, essentially looks like she's naked in every panel she appears in, color artists Vincius Andrade protecting her modesty, and there's at least one panel of Maria Hill weirdly jutting her breasts out Steve in their office (Page 20, panel 1, should you have a copy in front of you).
The whole affair reads like it was meant to be a pilot series for an Invaders ongoing, ending with a two-page spread featuring eight-person team posing, flashbacks to past adventures appearing in the clouds of mist seeming to emanate from The Vision, who declares, "Should freedom ever again be threatened... The INVADERS will answer the call."
The Invaders did indeed get a short-lived ongoing a few years later, with 2014's All-New Invaders by James Robinson, Steve Pugh and others, but it only featured half of this line-up—Steve Rogers (back to being Captain America), Namor, The Human Torch and Bucky Barnes (back to being The Winter Soldier)—and picking up a few other characters before its cancellation 15 issues later. Then in 2019, Chip Zdarsky helmed another short attempt at an ongoing featuring the same four heroes (Where was poor Toro in all of this?), this one only lasting 12 issues.
I think Invaders Now! was an effective enough reunion sort of comic, and could have served for a decent launchpad for something like a Marvel answer to DC's JSA, so I'm kinda curios why Marvel didn't commission such an ongoing from Gage, but instead waited a few years and had Robinson, who had actually co-written DC's millennial JSA for a bit, try his hand at a version of the team.
Revisiting it today, I think it provides a fun opportunity to see some of the original, pre-Marvel Marvel characters interacting and see some of the lesser-used characters like The Vision and Toro doing anything at all.
There's also a particularly fun bit hanging on some Marvel Universe lore, as when Namor takes The Torch back to Utopia, and a couple of shy young mutants blurt out, "IS IT TRUE YOU KILLED HITLER?"
After a silent, beat panel, where The Torch looks taken aback and Namor smiles at him smugly, two of the boys looking like they realize they said something they shouldn't have, and another flashing back to The Torch setting Hitler ablaze, he finally answers:
It's all right, son.
The answer is yes... ...I killed Hitler.And I don't mind talking about it at all. There are plenty of things I did in the war I'd rather forget... ...but setting that monster on fire and watching him burn...
...I regret I could only do it once.
On the following page, Namor tells The Torch that his willingness to set Hitlers on fire is part of the reason the world of the 21st century needs someone like Jim Hammond around:
What you said to those boys, Jim Hammond... You must understand that is why you're needed.
The warriors of today...The Avengers, The X-Men...They adhere to a different code. One perhaps appropriate to the modern world...but limited.
They are reluctant to kill...even the likes of Hitler. Those who are not averse tend to relish bloodshed. Often too much.The world needs men like you. Who will do what is necessary without hesitation, but recognize that war and peace are different states of being.
With the short life spans of these humans, such men are swiftly fading from the Earth.
Namor sold me...which makes it kinda too bad we don't see more of this Torch in Marvel comics these days.
And it makes me wonder, were Spider-Man in Hitler's bunker 80 years ago, would he have killed Hitler? Would Cyclops? Iron Man? Daredevil? Hawkeye?
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