“It’s a relatively simple concept, even to a layman: the Marvel Universe is coming to an end,” Brevoort says. The universe where such iconic characters including The X-Men, The Avengers, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and The Inhumans fly, fight and love has reached a violent extinction point. Brevoort, whose maintained a borderline-omniscient knowledge on all things Marvel for decades, generously offers his insight and expertise on the characters and developments.Įven if you’ve only watched a Marvel movie like Avengers: Age of Ultron without reading a comic, Secret Wars offers a simple, enticing hook: the world is ending for an entire world of beloved superheroes. That said, if you’re curious about the building blocks of this event, want to understand what exactly this event will mean for the most popular editorial line in comics and want to learn about one of the coolest, most involved superhero story arcs in recent memory, we’re here to support you. Most of the mysteries posed were solved in last week’s Avengers #44 and New Avengers #33. “If you start with Secret Wars #1 then go into Secret Wars #2, the basic structure of who the players are, where they are on the board and what they are struggling for will be laid out directly and simply.” “ Secret Wars was designed to be fairly straight-forward,” explains Tom Brevoort, Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of Publishing at Marvel. Comics of this magnitude cater to the curious as much as the converted, and the authors have crafted this event with newcomers in mind. That said, the Secret Wars miniseries, whose first issue debuts today, certainly won’t be impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the twists and turns that preceded it. These two series have featured scores of orbiting characters, emerging and receding in alternating story arc cycles to solve meticulous mysteries seeded years in advance.

Writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic’s eight-issue miniseries-set to conclude the Marvel Universe as we know it-lies on a foundation of 77 issues of comics Hickman’s been writing since 2012 in Avengers and New Avengers. To say that the history of Secret Wars has a lot of moving parts is a vast understatement: Marvel’s mammoth summer event is a Russian Nesting Doll of moving parts, if Russian Nesting Dolls could time travel and break into the fourth dimension.

Secret wars by jonathan hickman