Polite Dissent

More on Skrull-based food. Here we have a scene from Skull Kill Krew #2 (5 issue mini-series by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, and Steve Yeowell).

It all goes back to those original Skrulls the Fantastic Four fought way back in Fantastic Four #2. After those Skrulls were defeated, Reed Richards had them shape-shift into cows and then hypnotized them into believing that they were actually cows. It was these cow’s “Skrull milk” that led to the events of Fantastic Four Annual #17 (discussed yesterday). During the events of the Kree-Skrull War, the cow-Skrulls escaped, but at then end of the war, they were captured and transformed into cows again. According to Skrull Kill Krew, these skrull-cows were then sent to a slaughterhouse and ended up being made into Skrull ground beef and then Skrull burgers.

The concept of a virus being transmitted by the Skrull burgers is fairly consistent with Reed Richard’s statement that each Skrull molecule is essentially an unstable molecule that will attack any non-Skrull tissue it encounters — except that it sounds more like a prion than a virus. A prion is an infectious particle composed entirely of protein (as opposed to a virus which is nucleic acid, or nucleic acid and protein). Prions are a fairly recent discovery and not much is known about them. They seem to be more heat stable than viruses, so they would survive cooking into a burger. They are thought to be the infectious agent behind “Mad Cow Disease” (i.e. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) as well as other rare diseases including Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease and Kuru (a degenerative brain disease found among the cannibal tribes of New Guinea that is thought to be acquired by eating infected human brain).