This is "Provide Some Answers," which is a feature where long unresolved plot points are eventually resolved.

Today, we look at how John Byrne explained the Super Skrull's re-appearance in Silver Surfer Annual four years after the fact in the pages of Namor presumably because he did not feel as though the Silver Surfer Annual explanation adequately explained away how the Super-Skrull was no longer dealing with terminal cancer.

Everything started in Marvel Team-Up #62 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Dave Hunt, where Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel teamed up (naturally) to take on the Super-Skrull. The villain was trying to acquire a powerful cosmic object and in the end, Ms. Marvel realized that it was too powerful for the Skrull to handle, so she basically let him have it and it dispersed him around the universe...

A number of years later, in Alpha Flight #9 (by John Byrne), Walter Langkowski (the secret identity of Sasquatch of Alpha Flight) was working on a project that was discovering some strange signal. The team acquired the signal and brought it down and it appeared to be...the Thing?!?

However, to his horror, Walter saw the base destroyed as it became clear that the "Thing" was actually the Super-Skrull!

It turned out that being, well, energy for so long had given the Super-Skrull terminal cancer...

He then forced Walter to send him back to his home world where the Skrull scientists could hopefully cure him. Walter, though, just seeing this dude murder all of his colleagues, was none too pleased with the Skrull, so he instead "helped" him but then sent him on his way before the machine was finished, which basically tears him apart...

Okay, so fast forward a few years and in Silver Surfer #14 (by Steve Englehart, Joe Staton and Joe Rubinstein), the Surfer fights a Skrull agent. The agent escapes but it then killed by a group of humans. Before he dies, he sends some sort of blast into space...

This led into the 1988 Silver Surfer Annual (#1) by Englehart, Staton and Rubinstein and sure enough, that blast helped to free the Super-Skrull from his captivity in the radiation belt around the Earth...

So that's all well and good, but notice that the Super-Skrull also explained that he was now cured of his cancer. That seemed like a bit of a curious result, righT? I mean, whatever, I guess anti-matter something something cures you of cancer. It's comics. I wasn't exactly worried about it. However, since he was the guy who set the plot up, I imagine that John Byrne had a different reaction, so he actually decided to retroactively reveal how the Super-Skrull was cured when Byrne later used the character during his Namor run.

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In Namor #17 (by John Byrne), it turned out that the Iron Fist that we had seen in that comic for a few issues (after his "resurrection") was really the Super-Skrull!

Eight issues later, when Byrne was explaining the master plan of the villainous Master Khan that involved a lot of people pretending to be other people, he explained that Khan had freed the Super-Skrull and cured his cancer with his magic in exchange for him helping with the plan...

And then he sent him back into the radiation belt as a double cross (where he was then released in Silver Surfer Annual #1)...

Interesting stuff.

If anyone else has a suggestion for a comic book plot that got resolved after a few years (I tend to use two years as the minimum, as otherwise, you're probably just in the middle of the actual initial reveal of the storyline, ya know?), drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!