Once More, Without Feeling

Secret Wars was a sales juggernaut, which meant that a sequel was inevitable.  Announced even before the first crossover was over, Secret Wars II was the Platonic ideal of a bad superhero event, starting with its pedestrian and predictable name.  Where the first Secret Wars was structured in a way that only minimally interfered with ongoing titles, Secret Wars II was a recurring train wreck that crashed into nearly every comic Marvel published. Where the first event had the slick pencils of Mike Zeck, the second was handed to Art Milgrom, who was not doing his best work here.  Shooter was also not firing on all cylinders:  for all his faults as an editor, Shooter was an experienced and capable writer who had produced comics that are still widely acclaimed to this day (his first runs on Legion of Super-Heroes and The Avengers, for example).  He had signed on to write Secret Wars II, but his attention was divided and his interest intermittent; in particular, the characters’ dialogue suffered. 

Secret Wars II seemed determined to make all the mistakes the first series avoided. In an inversion of the original premise, now the heroes stayed put, but the Beyonder, who had decided to house his omnipotence in a human form, made appearances in every ongoing Marvel superhero comic, dropping in at random points and either bringing the action to a halt, steering it in an unexpected or barely motivated direction, or functioning as a Beyonder ex machinabefore going his merry way.  He also repeated one of the greatest cliches of low-rent sci-fi:  he wanted to learn what it was like to be “human.” Unfortunately for him, he launched this particular quest in the Eighties.  When he first appears, the Beyonder is a generically handsome blond man (Captain America as Aryan Ideal), before switching to long, black Jheri curls, a white jumpsuit, and shoulder pads. 

Can an omnipotent God make a hairstyle so bad even He can’t pull it off?

Since the Beyonder was omnipotent and could teleport, both his adventures in the main series and the tie-ins followed a logic that a charitable reader might call picaresque. The Beyonder attempts to woo two different female mutants (Dazzler, the disco queen and Boom-Boom, a teenage hooligan), gets Peter Parker to teach him how to use the bathroom, turns a building into gold after hearing Luke Cage complain about money, and hires Matt Murdock to represent him in his attempt to take over the world through legal means.  His motivations seem to be as much Shooter’s as his own.  Shooter used the series to settle scores.  One of the first things the Beyonder does is encounter a neurotic loser of a television writer clearly modeled on Steve Gerber, the creator of Howard the Duck fired by Shooter and sued Marvel over the rights to his creation.  The Beyonder bestows powers on the writer, but this only proves how pathetic the writer actually is. 

It’s a strange choice on Shooter’s part; given the power dynamics involved, his clumsy satire of Gerber would be punching down, if the punch were not so poorly aimed.  But it is also one of many signs that, intentionally or not, the Beyonder reads as a stand-in for Shooter himself.  As Sean Howe notes, “sneaking into Shooter’s stories, almost helplessly, was a recurring motif of persecuted deities,” particularly in the multi-issue Avengers storyline known as the “Korvac Saga.” In 1977 and 1978,  Shooter had Marvel’s heroes confront a cyborg from the future who had ascended to godhood (complete with the requisite perfect Aryan body).  Though his actions seemed sinister, Michael (as Korvac renamed himself) was  motivated by the desire to make the universe more just:   “I was in the unique position to alter that, to bring all of existence under my sane and benevolent rule,” he told the super-team. “I am a God! And I was going to be your savior!” Where others saw megalomania, Jim Shooter saw a beleaguered hero who only wanted to bring order to the galaxy.

Or, as Howe puts it later in the book, Shooter’s big theme was “trust power.”  The Beyonder is different from Michael, however, and not just because he used his godlike power to dye his hair black. Where Michael prizes order, the Beyonder is an agent of chaos, demanding that everyone around him cater to his whims. Where Shooter demanded that his writers kill off characters willy-nilly, both the Beyonder and Michael killed multiple heroes only to resurrect them; Michael was trying to maintain his plan, while the Beyonder (in keeping with his origin as a nameless force forcing living action figures to battle each other), simply tired of his toys.

Towards the end of his tenure at Marvel (he was fired in April of 1987, just a year after Secret Wars II ended), Shooter allegedly told his staff that

every single comic had to have a ‘can’t-must’ moment: I am not a thief . . . I don’t want to steal. But I must steal because my grandmother is starving. Every comic had to have that in the first three pages. Literally, a panel where the superhero had to say, ‘I can’t steal—but I must, for my grandmother.’... He was sending comics back to the Bullpen to have the ‘can’t-must’ panel squeezed in, in the middle of the page” (Ann Nocenti, quoted in Howe). 

Late Shooter is The Beyonder (or Michael)  in his decadent phase, when power has completely warped his judgment and made him lose the plot. 

Though Shooter would not be around to see it firsthand, the Secret Wars events permanently changed Marvel, if not quite the way comparable crossovers did at DC.  At both companies, the sales success of crossovers would make event comics a perennial feature, but it was only at DC that such events radically changed the nature of the company’s storyworld. At Marvel, it simply meant chasing after the next big event.  For the remainder of the Eighties, Marvel experimented with a few different formats and premises for its next events.  Two crossovers were limited to annuals (yearly special issues of ongoing titles) in order to recreate the thrill of the event without interfering with the monthly storylines:  The Evolutionary War (1988) and Atlantis Attacks (1989). Two more crossovers were closer in scale to Secret Wars, but without a miniseries to anchor them: Inferno (1988-1989) and Acts of Vengeance unfolded over several months’ worth of regular series.  Inferno had the advantage of being the culmination of years’ of X-Men-related subplots, as well as the follow-up to two previous crossover event that had been (mostly) limited to the X-books:  The Mutant Massacre (1986-1987) and Fall of the Mutants (1988), but both stories intruded on most of the comics almost at random.  Acts of Vengeance had a premise that could not be more basic:  a disguised Loki convinces Marvel’s villains to swap archenemies and fight heroes who were unfamiliar with them. 

Marvel would return to crossovers over the next several decades, to varying degrees of success. In the 1990s, Jim Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet (1991) and, to a lesser extent,  its two follow-ups, The Infinity War (1992) and The Infinity Crusade (1993), recaptured the excitement of the crossover story, while in the early twenty-first century, Civil War (2006-2007) and Secret Invasion (2008-2009) were huge commercial successes.  All of these series also found their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in one form or another. In 2015, Marvel published another (much better) Secret Wars event, which inspired an upcoming movie.  The legacy of Marvel’s events is undeniable. 

Next: Spider-Man Grows Up