artist: Esad Ribic
So here we are, Secret Wars commence! Again! This time infused with far, far more Jonathan Hickman!
Oh Hickman, Hickman, Hickman...There are times I wonder whatever happened to the Hickman I knew when he was still just an Image standout. Then he was recruited by Marvel to translate his style to mainstream comics, a move I strongly suspect as motivated by a desire to find the next Grant Morrison.
Hickman's most notable run at Marvel to date has been with Fantastic Four and its spin-off FF (which stood for Future Foundation, by the way) even though he was most recently running around with Avengers sticking out of his pockets. Secret Wars, so far as I can tell, is either directly related or at least inspired by his Fantastic Four, and there they are at the heart of the story, too (so it's not such a hard assumption to make, really).
And Hickman is full Hickman, making stylistic choices and approaching the whole story from a way that makes perfect sense in a Jonathan Hickman sort of way. If there's a problem with any of this, it's that the whole process is in service to a story that boils down to: Marvel doing another Super Dramatic Event, which has been a problem since Civil War, when the company first tried to duplicate the emotional impact of DC's Identity Crisis. The more Marvel tried, the more it permanently warped the course of its own future into an increasingly grim, impossible to avoid destiny of destroying everything it had once been.
You see, Marvel used to be fairly buoyant, bouncing back after even events like House of M, which "only" decimated the X-Men line while completely rejuvenating the Avengers. The Ultimate line, however, somewhat jubilantly tore itself apart from the very beginning, particularly with The Ultimates, which is half of how the cinematic Avengers came to be (the other half being the style of Brian Michael Bendis, who is like classic Marvel on crack).
The higher the stakes, the less Marvel could pretend, as it has for more than fifty years, that its continuity was an unbroken chain of events. And so Secret Wars is the story, finally, that does what DC has been doing for decades, which is purposely break those chains. That's what this first issue is all about, turning aside everything (hey! there's big bad Thanos randomly inserted into a pack of other villains!) and preparing a giant reset button.
Which, depending what you think about Marvel, is either very, very wrong or very, very right. I guess we'll see. I'm certain Hickman will have fun along the way. As to whether or not readers do, too, is somewhat beyond the point. There are already a billion spin-offs ready to launch, giving the fans plenty of other ways to view this event, almost none of which will look like anything Hickman will be doing for the next seven issues...
Or, as Marvel has always done, having its cake and eating it too.
I never read Secret Wars 1 so I doubt I'll read Secret Wars 2. The whole premise sounds kind of lame. Let's beam all these people here to fight...just cuz. It's like "The Savage Curtain" on Star Trek where aliens had Spock and Kirk with Lincoln and Surak fight a bunch of historical baddies...just cuz.
ReplyDeleteThe first Secret Wars was magnificent. It kind of ruined comics in the sense that it was a hyper-successful event that Marvel has been trying to replicate ever since (as with DC and "Crisis on Infinite Earths", but that doesn't change the fact that it was, in fact, awesome. It's worth your time, seriously.
DeleteI think Secret Wars 1 came first, so in a way it altered the destinies of two companies. And ironically, Secret Wars 2 is more of a response to what DC ended up doing than Marvel's original intent, which basically was to do what it's been trying to do with its superheroes for the last few years, which is basically to make everyone an Avenger. But my biggest awareness of Secret Wars 1 was in the action figures it inspired. So I may need to look into the actual comic...
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