Here's the thing: I hate parallel universes. I was burned by the Cross-Time Caper in Excaliber as a kid and I've never forgiven parallel universes and time travel for how badly they ruined what should have been a great book. I love the idea of destroying all of the complicated universes that make my favorite fictional world inconsistent and annoying. I like continuity. I don't want a bunch of Elseworlds garbage floating around muddying up my stories. I'm old school like that. Who do I want to see these characters fight? The inside of a black hole, an exploding red giant, the smell from Hulk's shoes. I don't care. I just want them to go away. We'll keep Miles Morales; everything else can go.
What's the point? I think the idea is to clean up Age of Ultron where the solution required Wolverine and Sue Storm to tear a whole in time to stop Ultron before he was "born". The consequences ripped space/time a new arsehole and resulted in, among other things, Angela popping into the Marvel U. I suspect the genesis of the colliding Earths problem in Avengers to be related to this irresponsible use of time travel. The motivation at Marvel? Well, a lot of things, but I think chief among those is to get Miles Morales out of the Ultimate U., a collapsing portion of the Marvel line, and into the 616 universe where he can raise his profile (and hopefully his sales numbers). The ancillary benefit is telling some big action stories that may appeal to a variety of casual fans of old x-overs. Which, ok -- sure. That's a little cheap but you've got to put butts in the seats.
Marvel has released some map that shows all of the action. You can see that here: http://www.newsarama.com/22828-marvel-release-full-map-of-secret-wars-battleworld.html. Various sites have spent their time trying to break down what is who and such. I won't do that. I just want to read the stories.
What am I most looking forward to from Secret Wars? Eh. I sort of hate the idea, but I trust the creators so I'm just going to hold my breath and trust in Hickman and Ribic. They're two of the best. Even given that, I can't help but feel like we're being gamed with a ton of mini's, one-shots, and once-off appearances in books no one is reading. But, Hickman. In Hickman I trust. So I'm looking forward to that. Look, I'm gonna buy it. I just hope that it's not real dumb and a waste of time. There are simpler ways to get MM into the main Marvel U. (he's already been there like 10 times!).
Other things: well, Duckworld. I was actually thinking to myself, "Will there be Howard the Duck?" Short answer: yes. I love Howard the Duck. That's awesome. Maestro and Old Man Logan were good, so I'll look forward to seeing those products, presuming they feature good creators. Actually, everything to me depends on that. I don't read comics for the properties. I read them for the writers and artists. If the material is good, I can read any character. And some stories are so bad it doesn't matter how much you like the characters, it's unreadable (see: Excaliber). For me, everything will depend on whether I trust the people producing the books.
What does this mean for things like Edge of the Spider-Verse? A new Spider-Gwen (a hot new character featuring the Gwen Stacy from an alternate universe that's taken the mantle of Spider-Man where she comes from) book is on the way. Miles and the 616 Peter Parker are teaming up to fight the creepy space vampires who feed off of Spider-stuff. Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham is around (awesome). Is Secret Wars going to get rid of all of these characters? I hope so. I hated the idea of Edge of the Spider-Verse from the moment I heard about it. I will admit that the ASM portion by Slott and Coipel has been good (not great), but I still have a bad taste in my mouth regarding the nature of this story. In my estimation, too much parallel universe and time play never goes well. It doesn't build a strong story that can last. On-going comics need continuity.
I'd like to see Marvel declare a one year moratorium on new cross-overs and focus on story an character development. Their best books, with the exception of the Avengers, have largely been immune to cross-overs or barely affected by them. Hawkeye is a good model for how to handle a comic book: explore the character, introduce slowly a supporting cast and some rogues, and tell good, complete stories. Cross-overs are like a cannonball in the pool: fun, but kind of dicky. I get it: they sell books so I'm wrong. But this statement makes a suggestion about how consumers work that's unsupportable: it's implies that they have intrinsic interests, not influenced or even led by availability and marketing. Push Hawkeye like you push cross-overs and the industry would be different. People buy what you sell them. Let's sell good books. That said, maybe Secret Wars will be super tight. Maybe it'll be as good as Original Sin or Civil War. Maybe it's not a Cross-Time Caper. Only time will tell. It's a SECRET war after all.
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