Captain Marvel: Your guide to everything Skrulls

The Kree-Skrull War: Starring the Avengers (1983) #1. Photo Credit: Marvel Comics.

The Kree-Skrull War

Documented in Avengers Vol. 1 #89-97, the Kree-Skrull war houses a lot of mini-crises that the Avengers, Mar-Vell, and Carol Danvers have to resolve. Basically, the Skrulls want to take over Earth, so they catfish a bunch of civilians into thinking they’re the real Avengers. While they’re moonlighting as the Avengers, they cause some mayhem to make the Earthlings lose their faith in the heroes.

Meanwhile, Ronan the Accuser tries to revert Earth back to pre-human times, so the Kree can use the planet as a military base for their ongoing war with the Skrulls. Then, the Skrulls help a few of Earth’s heroes hostage to blackmail Mar-Vell into helping them kill the Kree. Basically, it’s a multi-layered disaster that would make the chaotic Asgardian prince proud.

While the Kree and Skrulls use Earth as a battlefield to fight out their issues, the Skrulls hate the Kree because way, way, way, way back the Kree stole Skrull technology from the Cotati (and committed genocide in the process) and used it to help their own planetary empire flourish.

The Kree originally found out that their planetary neighbors, the Cotati, had traded their own technology with the Skrulls’ advanced technology. So, the advanced Kree empire you see in Captain Marvel was probably built with a lot of Skrull tech that they literally killed to get.

The actual Kree-Skrull war started from a culmination of rivalry between the two alien races and the fact that the Kree annihilated the Cotati, who were implicitly allied to their green neighbors. However, most fans just know that they don’t get along, probably because they’re both striving for power in the universe. While the Kree mostly seek political power and the Skrulls physical power, they use their extended war to rule and enslave new planets to bolster their army and weaponry against the other.

Based on Carol Danvers’ comic origin and the Kree-Skrull war, Captain Marvel probably won’t draw inspiration from all the strange subplots in the original arc (or the updated comic event). However, we’ll definitely still see the classic Skrulls (Prime Skrulls) we’re used to, and their cinematic debut could introduce another type of Skrull.