Annihilation: Super-Skrull #1-#4

** (two of five stars)

Summary
Super-Skrull is defending a Skrull world from the Annihilation Wave when he witnesses one of its warships, the Harvester of Sorrow, destroy the entire planet.  He flees to a Skrull warship controlled by one of the warlords now running the Skrull empire and asks her to provide him with a platoon to attack the Wave.  She refuses, since it could open up her territory to conquest from another warlord.  She insults him as a has-been disgrace and he attacks her.  The Super-Skrull flees and a young mechanic, R'Kin, rescues him, telling him that he had always been his idol.  Taking R'Kin with him, the Super-Skrull gets Reed Richards to send him into the Negative Zone to raise an army of those who oppose Annihilus.  Through torturing an official loyal to Annihilus, Super-Skrull discovers that the Harvester is a living organism created by a Hawal, who runs a prison planet.  The Super-Skrull attacks the planet and finds Hawal, who tells him he can create a virus to destroy the Harvester.  Two escaped prisoners sign onto the crusade to stop the Annihilation Wave to stick it to their jailers, and the Super-Skrull turns the rest of the prisoners into his army.  R'Kin builds a dimensional portal and asks the Super-Skrull if he can be the one to deliver the virus bomb, so he can finally strike blood.  The Super-Skrull leads the defense of Zaragz'na, the ancestral Skrull home world where the Super-Skrull's son lives.  However, R'Kin is revealed to be a traitor who did not deliver the bomb, and the Wave captures the Super-Skrull and his two followers and destroys Zaragz'na.  The Super-Skrull hypnotizes R'Kin and gets him to free him and the two other prisoners.  One of the prisoners, the robot Praxagora, plans on detonating the reactor core that fuels her to destroy the Harvester, while the Super-Skrull tracks down R'Kin.  R'Kin says he betrayed the Super-Skrull because he learned that he's a villain and that war makes no sense.  After amputating R'Kin's limbs so he cannot escape, the Super-Skrull finds Praxagora and absorbs her detonation, allowing her to live and him to make the sacrifice.  In the end, thousands of days after Annihilation Day, it's revealed the Skrulls worship the Super-Skrull as the hero he wished to be.

The Good
It seems odd to mark it as a "good" but this series is unspeakably sad.  Grillo-Marxuach gives us a group of truly wounded characters, from the Super-Skrull, who realizes too late that he should have focused more on his son and seeks to save him as his last act of redemption, to Praxagora, the last surviving member of her race.  I've rarely read an issue with a heavier heart than I did #4, where R'Kin narrates his horrible betrayal and Praxagora narrates her preparation to sacrifice her life.

The Bad
1) Why is the Skrull Empire broken apart again?  As mentioned elsewhere in these "Annihilation" reviews, I feel like I needed a better cheat sheet on the Skrull Empire than we got in the "Annihilation:  Prologue" series.

2) Holy pet peeve #2, Batman!  The introduction page to issue #2 tells us that the Super-Skrull has invaded the Negative Zone, captured someone who can destroy the Harvester of Sorrows, and found some allies.  Um, those events SEEM kind of important, so you think they'd happen ON PANEL.  Except, they do actually happen on panel.  They happen over the first few pages of issue #2 itself.  Rather than leaving the reader feeling like he missed an issue (which I totally felt), you'd think they've would've not spoiled the first few pages of the issue in the introduction page.  Since the same page appears in issue #3, it seems pretty clear that it was an error, but still!

3) So, R'Kin betrayed the Super-Skrull and his team because he felt that the Super-Skrull wasn't heroic (and was in fact a villain) and that war was pointless.  So, he becomes a traitor and lets the Wave devour the Skrull home world, killing millions of people?  Really?  Grillo-Marxuach really lost me with this pretty far-fetched explanation, which is why I give the series only two stars despite being mostly enjoyable.