Captain Marvel: 9 Things You Need To Know About The Skrulls

Those deviant Skrulls who became the definitive lot and created a galaxy-spanning Empire were also gifted with the ability to mimic other life forms. This made invasion remarkably easy, as Skrull operatives were able to blend in seamlessly with a local population and break a social structure apart from the inside.

Originally creating the Skrulls in the 1960s, Stan Lee and fellow Marvel master Jack Kirby based this idea on the Cold War paranoia that gripped the US during that period of history. The idea that Russia was infiltrating and spreading a communist ideology from within - dubbed the 'fifth column' - pervaded across popular culture too, with Sci-Fi literature in particular bearing the brunt of this anxiety.

But such an open-ended concept was swiftly able to shed its Cold War references, and become representative of just about any wave of paranoia gripping real-life humanity at any given time. It also looks set to be re-worked in the new Captain Marvel film, though in what form, nobody quite knows yet. There is however a concrete fact amidst the Skrull/Marvel Universe....