The first Secret Wars was created to sell toys. It was 1984, and the United States was under siege by a deluge of action-figure brands. Kenner had snatched up a license to produce figures based on DC Comics characters, bolstering their already massive Star Wars profits of the previous six years. Mattel – already competing gamely with Masters of the Universe – felt they needed to respond with their own comics-based fare, licensed Marvel characters, and asked for a comic book with which to market their line.
The resultant Secret Wars was effectively the first ‘event’ crossover series, beating DC Comics’ much more driven event, Crisis on Infinite Earths, to market by nearly a year; it was also a massive seller, despite being widely disliked by fans. “Events also preyed on the completist mentality of many collectors,” writes Reed Tucker in his monumental 2017 book Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC, “Failing to buy a series would leave a painful, gaping hole in their meticulously curated collections. One conflicted member of a Chicago comic book club told Comics Interview magazine in 1985 that every member of his group bought Marvel’s Secret Wars—they just didn’t read it.”
Marvel Comics
Secret Wars II was engineered to maximize that completist mentality in the most forceful way possible, spilling the event over into forty-two issues across all of Marvel’s major titles. It was unprecedented, but of course it was: it was only the third ‘event’ in comic book history. Marvel and DC were digging new trenches, hoping to strike gold.
Marvel Comics
Marvel struck gold, but that gold never found its way to the reader – the event essentially strong-armed fans to purchase every issue to understand its troubled narrative. The first eight issues of Secret Wars II end with ever-lengthening reading lists, pointing in the direction of The New Mutants, Captain America, and Iron Man; if a reader attempts to skip the homework and move on to the next issue of the main title, they find themselves – and the book’s central figure, the Beyonder – in a completely different locale, conflict, and state of mind.
Marvel Comics
There is no cohesion, no theme, and no point; nothing the Beyonder does has any repercussion, no matter how epic (or how minor) the action is. In one issue he decides that he must do away with mortality, and so he kills Death. Four pages later – four pages in which little of note happens – he recreates Her (at the expense of a minor supporting character, introduced and discarded in the space of that single issue). Dazzler is given immeasurable power and rejects it four panels later. A woman, despondent because the Beyonder breaks up with her, kills herself – she is resurrected and told to go away. She does so, and she is never heard from again.
Marvel Comics
Not even the Beyonder’s eating habits matter; in an early issue, after discovering the joys of eating, he grows overweight and magics that weight away – this serves no narrative purpose but to illustrate his endless power. It is exhausting.
More damnably, the Beyonder’s presence in those 33 other issues – his inclusion in, interruption of, and subsequent exit from them – is equally impotent. Twenty-three total series are overridden by the event, and only one – Chris Claremont and Mary Wilshire’s The New Mutants – suffers any lasting consequence. The Beyond murders the whole team in Mutants #37 before recreating them as a minor plot point in the final issue Secret Wars II. The team is understandably traumatized, and undergoes severe issues of soul-crushing ennui in the aftermath.
Marvel Comics
Secret Wars II is most notable for setting a very dangerous precedent in comic book events, one that the Big Two have never fully learned from. Line-wide intrusions are annual practice and have been since 1984, and while some years are kind enough to contain their narrative in one succinct miniseries, some egregiously overwhelm the reading experience for months at a time. For examples of this, see 1989’s Inferno, 2019’s War of the Realms, 1993’s Bloodlines, and, most recently, Knight Terrors from this very year.
Secret Wars II is a terribly written story – if there is a comic book version of chewing scenery, Jim Shooter manages it here – and its art, by the usually terrific Al Milgrom, suffers from a grueling time crunch. It is notoriously one of the worst times a reader of superhero comics can have (perhaps second only to the aforementioned Bloodlines).
But – and this is a very strong but – it is a foundational and important chapter of comic book history, the third step of a never-ending staircase to now. It deserves academic attention now in the exact opposite way that it didn’t deserve financial attention in 1985. Without it, comics would not be the same. This review’s rating reflects that academic importance over the actual quality of the artistic output; to all those souls brave enough to attempt all 42 issues, I wish you luck.
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