Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #1 – Flashback Review

By: Jim Shooter (writer), Michael Zeck (pencils), John Beatty (inks), Christie Scheele (colors) & Joe Rosen (letters)

The Story: The Beyonder spirits a select group of Marvel heroes and villains away to do battle.

What’s Good: This was THE comic event of my early comic collecting life.  Back in this day, Marvel had Secret Wars and DC had Crisis and that was about it for awhile.  Not like today where the X-franchise has had three events in the last 18 months (Messiah War, Necrosha & Second Coming).  This is one instance where I do miss the good old days.  Secret Wars was also a bit odd for Marvel in that it got a little out of continuity.  I was reading Uncanny X-Men at the time and the entirety of Secret Wars takes place between two issues of Uncanny: In one issue they are whisked away and they are back the next issue.  Then, they spent the next 12 issues of Uncanny vaguely alluding to what happened and in a remarkable bit of editorial control, they didn’t spoil anything.  This approach was mostly noteworthy because at this time Marvel otherwise exercised pretty tight continuity among their titles.  If a worldwide snowstorm struck in Thor in April, by God it was snowing in all the Marvel titles that month [ * along with a helpful footnote that explained why it was snowing and what issues of Thor you could read if you wanted to know more].

Getting on to the issue, there was no earthy way that this could not be awesome.  On the good guy’s side you had the X-Men (sans Kitty Pryde who had to go sleep at the New Mutants house), the Avengers, the FF & Hulk… and Magneto.  Opposing them you had Ultron, Enchantress, The Absorbing Man, Wrecker (and his crew), Kang, Lizard, Doc Ock, Molecule Man, Dr. Doom, Galactus.  Just the initial character line-ups were very interesting.  Magneto on the side of good?  Back in this era, Marvel hadn’t really dug into Magneto much but Secret Wars was the beginning of his (first) redemption.  Even the X-Men were a bit of an odd choice because they were such outcasts at the time.