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Secret Wars


I think it's time I finally took a moment to talk bout Marvel's Secret Wars event and all the subsequent spin off books.

Jonathan Hickman's Magnum Opus of his Marvel run is playing out before our eyes. All of his Avengers work (which honestly left me cold) has culminated up to this point. The Secret Wars series itself has been really good. It's been in the classic tradition of mixing up the characters into groups that you don't normally see. There have been truly shocking moments. The spinoff books however have been mostly terrible.

Here's the premise of this whole crossover in a nutshell. Reality has been destroyed by cosmic forces (isn't that always the way) and the Marvel Universe as we know it ceases to exist. Dr. Doom, who has become all powerful, saves bits and pieces of this reality and has cobbled it together into a place called "Battleworld" where he has affixed him self as a God.

This has given Marvel a chance to mine all of our childhoods by having many books focus on returns to various eras throughout their history. A clever ploy, but you're not going to get me, Marvel. I was burned by your LAST return to the "Age of Apocalypse" universe. I do not care how you want to play out your alternate realities of Civil War, Future Imperfect, Armor Wars, Infinity Gauntlet, Korvac Saga, X-Tinction Agenda and so on. Did I miss a few? Of course I did, but I'm not going to name all of them.

What bothers me is you have all these different realities cobbled together into one world. So basically you can have 20 Wolverines running around at the same time in this new world. Of course they never run into each other because each of these stupid stories are self-contained in this weird way. Honestly, the whole thing is an absolute mess.

The true gems out of this event have been "Master of Kung Fu", "Years of Future Past" and "Runaways". Oh yeah, I also have a soft spot in my heart for "X-Men 92'". Even IF it is a mish-mash of the Blue and Gold teams! Anyways, each of these books speak to some of my comic book sensibilities. I tried some of the others and just could not muster up the ability to care. There are just way too many of these books. It's this kind of cash grab that makes me very cynical as a fan.

Fortunately, as an educated consumer I don't have to buy all of these. I definitely don't feel compelled to. To summarize my thoughts in a nutshell: Secret Wars Mini-Series = good. Everything else = bad. I just want this to be all over so we can get to our All New Marvel Universe.

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