The Marvel Universe we knew is dead. In its place is a new gestalt planet, stitched together from pieces of the preceding multiverse by the all-powerful will of Dr. Doom. This week, weâll get our first real glimpses of the realms that make up Battleworld.
Secret Wars is the summer publishing event that promises to re-make the fictional landscape where Marvel Comicsâ superhero characters live. So far, longtime readers have been privy to the decline and death portions of the rebirth cycle, in the now-defunct New Avengers title and the just-started Secret Wars series. A collection of books tying into the event starts rolling out this week, with Spider-Verse, Planet Hulk and A-Force among the series that are first out of the gate. Consider them the chrysalis for the Marvel Universe thatâs yet to come.
Part of the hook for these satellite series is that Marvelâs already said some of them will be carrying over (like A-Force) to the new, reconstituted mainline universe that shakes out once Secret Wars is over. But the first issues of Spider-Verse, Planet Hulk and A-Force work on their own.
In each book, fragments of the old worlds linger. This new patchwork reality is most interesting in how each bookâs creators choose to use those echoes. In Spider-Verseâby Mike Costa and Andre Araujoâ we see the Spider-Gwen version of Gwen Stacy dealing with a nagging sense that existence is off. She stares at her grave, unable to avoid the fact that she isnât alive in some reality somewhere thatâs crashed into hers. Peter Parkerâs gone missing in this reality but other Spider-heroes show up to fight crime and wonder at the anomaly of them being all in the same place. Norman Osborn still exists, though, and Gwen invents a secret identity so that she can work for him, in a bit of counter-intuitive logic, to hack his information network. What she finds is an arachnoid ally that doesnât seem to fit in at all in this tangled-web world and a bigger mystery about what Norman Osborn knows.
This is a legion of heroines long used to the scheduled patrols and teamwork necessary to keep the island of Arcadia safe. But when Young Avengersâ America Chavez throws a giant megalodon over the islandâs borders, she herself gets thrown into exile. Her housemates Loki (in a previously-seen female form) and Sister Grimm (a.k.a. young witch Nico Minoru from Runaways) rage at the injustice handed to Miss America but the characters in A-Force arenât heavily remixed.
Thereâs one or two instances of speech patterns getting slanted in a more courtly mode but, by and large, these are characters have their recognizable personalities.
Planet Hulk is the least familiar of this initial Battleworld crop. As the title implies, thereâs not just one Hulk in the realm of Greenland; hundreds of green-skinned behemoths stalk the land. Yet, itâs a gladiator version of Captain Americaâwith 1970s Marvel character Devil Dinosaur in towâ whose story we wind up following. In the comic made by writer Sam Humphries and artist Marc Laming, we meet a Steve Rogers whoâs mourning missing-in-action partner Bucky Barnes.
He staves his own death sentence from Doom by reluctantly agreeing to go into Greenland on an assassination mission for the throne, with the promise that heâll find out the fate of Bucky in the process.
The best part of these books is that they all have stories of their own. Thereâs more freshness in this first crop than in the tie-in titles accompanying DCâs rival Convergence event, which have hit the same beats way too often for readers to care. Yeah, youâd be better off if you knew about the particulars of the first two issues of Secret Wars but such foreknowledge isnât required. Thereâs enough tantalizing world-building in Spider-Verse, Planet Hulk and A-Forceâs
first issues that readers will want to know what the histories of these realms. Itâs a good omen for the coming deluge of tie-in books that will flesh out the world of Secret Wars.
