Marvel’s next big crossover event brings back one of comics’ biggest battles ever
Marvel Comics has announced at New York Comic-Con that its next company-wide “event” storyline will be a revisitation of 1984’s “Secret Wars” concept from writer Johnathan Hickman and writer Esad Ribic. The story will pick up in the aftermath of the current “Time Runs Out” storyline in the Avengers books.
The original “Secret Wars” was a 12-issue megaseries originally published from May 1984 to April 1985. The story concerned a cosmic entity called The Beyonder transporting all-star teams of superheroes and supervillains to the extraterrestrial plane of Battleworld and forcing them to fight in order to better understand the nature of good and evil. The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The X-Men, Doctor Doom, Magneto, The Hulk and others were among the combatants, with others joining (and new characters emerging) as the story went on.
Conceived initially as a vehicle to help launch and promote a new line of Marvel action figures from Mattel, it became an integral part of Marvel Universe history due its explanation of major continuity shakeups. While the series was running, many participating characters were returned “immediately” to their regular books, drastically altered in appearance, alignment, team make-up, etc., by the events on Battleworld. Spider-Man got his black symbiote suit, The Thing temporarily left The Fantastic Four (She-Hulk filled in for him on the team) and Colossus broke up with Kitty Pryde.
The cause, form and participants of the 2015 series has not been revealed, but speculation has run rampant for over a year that Marvel may be positioning its comic series for anything from a universe-wide continuity reboot to an integration of the normal and “Ultimate” universes. An Alex Ross image accompanying the reveal showed multiple versions of heroes like Captain America and Thor, along with Miles Morales, an incarnation of Spider-Man.
Source: USA Today
