Part of an ongoing series revisiting graphic novels and collected editions from days gone by....

It has been a long while since I read any Ms. Marvel books. The last time I did, her second ongoing series, of which this is the fourth collection, was still fresh from the printer.

Just for clarity's sake, I'll note her first series ran for a mere 23 issues back in 1977-79, while the second series ran for 50 issues in 2006-10. This was still a few years before the character was redubbed Captain Marvel, making the way for a couple of other characters who used the name -- most notably, teenager Kamala Khan -- and long before the character of Carol Danvers made her live-action debut as Captain Marvel in the MCU.

Anyway, it has been a while, and I was a few pages into Monster Smash before I picked up the thread of the ongoing storyline. After some losses in the previous book, Carol requests two super-powered replacement agents from S.H.I.E.L.D. for her Lightning Force strike team ... and she gets a dubious pair, the ill-mannered android Machine Man, aka Aaron Stack, and the alien-inhabited Sleepwalker, aka Rick Sheridan. Neither character adds much interest to the team, or the book; Machine Man in particular is overused for humor that, in my opinion, isn't all that funny.

J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of the Daily Bugle (and more commonly associated with Spider-Man), takes aim at Carol for her apparent misdeeds. Oh, and Carol has apparently been turning blue and vomiting blood at awkward moments, leading her to the X-Men's Beast for analysis.

Also, the notorious Puppet Master, aka Philip Masters, appears in Chile where he is mind-controlling a veritable army for deadly fight-club shenanigans and other, even less savory uses; among his captive slaves are Tigra, Cassie "Giant-Girl" Lang and Anya Corazon, who was Spider-Girl at the time.

Of course, as is expected in comics, heroes end up fighting heroes before everything gets sorted out.

And then there's a whole thing with the blue alien Cru and an infestation on Monster Island of the insect-like aliens known as the Brood. Carol ends up facing the aliens -- who are so much like the aliens from Aliens that I can't believe there wasn't some form of copyright dispute -- without her powers, which makes things a little tougher.

The book ends on a cliffhanger leading into Marvel's Secret Invasion event. Is Ms. Marvel ... a Skrull? Tune in next issue to find out!

If I were still reading comics with the enthusiasm and frequency of my younger days, I might consider adding this series to my pull list. The art by Aaron Lopresti is particularly strong, but Brian Reed's scripting is no slouch, either. He certainly packs a lot between the covers of this issue -- frankly, I think the Pupper Master and Cru storylines deserved more pages, but of course ink and paper are always at a premium in the comic-book industry.