10 Biggest Comic Book Twists You Never Saw Coming
5. The Skrulls Among Us
The Skrulls were once an annoying but ultimately silly race of aliens. The Fantastic Four made a team of them transform themselves into cows, after all. But when they used their shape-shifting skills to begin a covert invasion of the 616 Earth, it quickly became hard to know who to trust during the Secret Invasion.
One of the consequences of the superhero Civil War and the desolation of the Avengers was that their ally Ronin was left in Japan without any backup against the Hand. Ronin was captured and discovered to be the deaf hero Echo. Word got back to Wolverine and he convinced his team of New Avengers to travel to Japan to save her. During the fight, Echo killed Elektra, who turned into a Skrull when she died. This immediately made the New Avengers distrust each other.
Spider-Woman, who had already been replaced, suggested that only Iron Man had the equipment to determine what Elektra truly was. Luke Cage angrily claimed that if anyone was a Skrull, it had to be Stark, based on his actions. She fought the team and took the corpse to Stark. The shocked Iron Man contacted his fellow members of the clandestine Illuminati, discovering that Black Bolt was also a Skrull that Namor killed. They left realizing that they could not truly trust one another.