Secret Wars

Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, Bob Layton & others
Secret Wars (1984)
I became vaguely aware of this one when I noticed an issue of the Marvel UK reprint in my local newsagent. I'd been off the comics for a while and hadn't even bothered with 2000AD since about 1980, never mind the caped stuff. I thought it looked lame, even desperate with all those superheroes crowded together on the cover. It seemed to suggest that those responsible had run out of ideas and were now pushing the novelty of lurid combinations of characters in a last bid attempt to keep the magic alive, sheer force of quantity over quality - like a superhero version of the Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters but without the charm. A couple of years later, as I discovered comic books afresh, I asked Charlie, my Marvel comic acquisition advisor, whether Secret Wars had been any good. It was okay, he told me, but was basically one massive crowd of super types yelling let's get them, before running across the plain and having a fight with a rival crowd of super types, over and over for the full twelve issues.

Now that I've finally read the thing, I can confirm that this is more or less what happens. It seems to have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths.

As it turns out, action figures were a significant part of the creative process which brought us Secret Wars. DC Comics had recently had a bunch of their superheroes issued as action figures by Kenner Toys and were doing quite well from it. Marvel made a deal with Mattel for their own range, but Mattel insisted there would need to be some massive attention grabbing crossover event to sell the thing - which DC hadn't required due to Superman and Batman having maintained a fairly high profile thanks to movies and television.

The premiss of Secret Wars is that a mysterious, omnipotent intelligence identified only as the Beyonder abducts a bunch of Marvel superheroes and sets them up on a world he's made out of bits of other planets specifically so that they can all have a massive scrap with a bunch of Marvel bad guys. Although Secret Wars is remembered as the first such mammoth crossover event of its kind, it could be argued that the first was probably the Avengers-Defenders War waged across alternating issues of their respective titles back in 1973. DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared shortly after in 1985, but had been in development at least since the December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal wherein it was referred to as a forthcoming twelve part series affecting the entire DC universe.

This being said, the notion of some Godlike being spiriting disparate groups of abductees away to a mysterious realm and having them fight had been around for a while, at least since 1969's War Games by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which, being a Doctor Who serial, means they had almost certainly nicked it from someone else, possibly Fritz Leiber's change war tales or Andre Norton's Defiant Agents; and I'm sure the idea informs something written by A.E. van Vogt, although I can't remember what. I myself first encountered the plot in Fredric Brown's Arena from a 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, although admittedly I specifically encountered the 1973 comic strip adaptation by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in Worlds Unknown #4, which I found in a jumble sale held at my junior school and which was probably the first American Marvel comic I'd ever seen.

 

Anyway, Secret Wars comes about due to a seemingly all-powerful intelligence from a universe beyond our own - hence the name of its sole inhabitant - discovering a pinhole, accidentally created by the Molecule Man, through which he is able to view our reality. In his own realm, the Beyonder is the universe, so naturally he has a lot of questions about what he sees on our side of the cosmic fence and is particularly curious about desire. For some reason he deduces that the best way to develop an understanding of desire is to have a bunch of caped types beat the crap out of each other, which at least spared us investigations of a kind which would have ensured that pow! the comic book grew up a full two years ahead of Alan Moore's schedule, even if having the Beyonder watch what happens when a man and a lady like each other would have made a bit more sense.

Amongst the abductees we find most of the X-Men, excepting Kitty Pryde who gets left behind on Earth so as to give Colossus something to do - specifically mooning around whining about how much he misses his uncomfortably youthful girlfriend, before finding solace in the arms of an alien woman named Ƶsaji, an inhabitant of one of the planets from which the Beyonder made Battleworld, and with whom Colossus shares no common language excepting possibly the language of lurve. Ƶsaji talks in abstract squiggles so, honestly, I'm not even sure how we know her name. Ƶsaji may even mean piss off, metal bollocks in whatever language she speaks.

The Beyonder restores Professor X's legs to full working order, presumably because Battleworld features neither roads nor paving that we can see and therefore falls some way short of wheelchair friendly. He also assigns Magneto to the superhero team, much to the general bemusement of numerous members of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, not least Hawkeye who comes to resemble Enoch Powell for at least a couple of panels. Here Magneto was still very much in the habit of explaining his fiendish plans and then cackling accordingly, in addition to which Rogue - who recently fought Captain America and pals in Avengers annual #10 - now numbers among the X-Men, inspiring much grumbling about mutants coming over here and taking our jobs from those whose super-powers were earned during honest laboratory experiments gone horribly wrong just as nature intended. The mutants therefore form a splinter group, seemingly for the sake of keeping the peace, even though they're not thrilled about Magneto's presence either. At this point, the plans which Magneto tended to explain in preface to cackling usually defined him as a militant advocate of mutant rights, although not so much as to prevent him from trying it on with the undeniably human Wasp; so presumable we're seeing the beginning of his rehabilitation as someone who doesn't actually hate regular humans quite so much as he did in the old days.

The story is, as already described, something which may as well have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths; despite which, there's a lot of invention taking place with all sorts of narrative swerves of a kind you might not expect in this sort of story. Possibly most surprising of all is the genuinely ominous implication of unimaginable power invoked herein in spite of Marvel's track record of invoking something even more huge and cosmically omnipotent than the last guy roughly every six weeks, at least since Jim Starlin drew his first paycheck back in 1972.

The conclusion might be deemed something of an anticlimax, and doubtless seemed so to the Goodreads fucknugget who criticised this graphic novel on the grounds of it seeming fairly childish, like something aimed at kids. The Beyonder sends everyone home and we're not quite sure whether or not there will be another issue because the fighting seems to have stopped, and we don't even know whether our cosmic architect actually learned anything about desire, or even whether he at least got a kick out of all the superheroes shooting rays at each other. This leaves us with just the Thing alone on Battleworld, taking a break from the Fantastic Four and having decided to stick around, wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. On the other hand, this unusually ponderous ending seems to be something which would have worked in a novel, and nevertheless works better than whatever face-punching spectacular we were probably expecting; and there's actually a lot of Secret Wars which feels as though it wants to be novel when it grows up, or at least that it has read one at some point. Doctor Doom comes over as unusually philosophical during the last two issues, for example.

Secret Wars is hardly life-changing, but for what it is, it does its job without looking too stupid; which is itself impressive given that we're talking about what is essentially a marketing campaign.

Deathlok the Demolisher

Rich Buckler, Doug Moench & others Deathlok the Demolisher (1976)
Excluding English black and white reprints, the first American comics I can recall are Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, and the first issue of Phoenix from the short lived Atlas Comics, dating respectively from November 1973, May 1976, and January 1975. These turned up at some sort of jumble sale held at my school, Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, possibly on more than one occasion. I seem to recall the two Marvel comics being found together, but I'm not sure about Phoenix. Anyway, they were in colour with stories of filmic aspiration spread across a much higher page count than that to which I was accustomed. As science-fiction, they made The Whizzers from Space in the Topper seem slightly ridiculous. They made a huge impression.

Deathlok was a cyborg, and a surprisingly gruesome creation for Marvel, but this was the seventies and America was still trying to process the Vietnam war and the rise of its own counterculture; so Deathlok is a much darker spin on square-jawed Steve Austin. It wasn't quite a case of rebuilding him - seeing as he was actually killed and was therefore a stiff, but they augmented him with robotic parts, put a computer in his head, and reanimated the dead bits with preservative in the hope of slowing his deterioration. Most depressing of all is that having been revived, the computer prevents him from killing himself, leaving him no choice but to serve as a programmable assassin. You can see how it might have left him feeling a bit grumpy.

Deathlok the Demolisher was set in a post-apocalyptic America and is therefore approximately a mash-up of Shelley's Frankenstein, I Am Legend and its big screen reincarnation as The Omega Man, plus a whole load of countercultural ill-will. We're at some distance from truth, justice and the American way.

Deathlok is the warrior let down by his country, the soldier who becomes aware of his own place within an industrial process, and the parallels with those returned or otherwise from the Vietnam war are difficult to miss.

All the places Janice - my wife - and I went to when I was normal! All of it - gone. The restaurants, theaters, everything that was precious to me - gone.

So, as is probably obvious, the Deathlok of Astonishing Tales was one of those strips pitched beyond the traditional Marvel audience, more in the direction of your older brother with his prog rock albums and Farrah Fawcett posters. It was ponderous, vaguely cerebral, and not afraid to unsettle its readership - maybe not Crime and Punishment but certainly a few stages on from Superman's brightly coloured adventures; and most notably, much of issue #35 occurs within a computer generated reality - possibly not quite the first but substantially predating the popularisation of cyberspace by William Gibson and others, and even predating Tom Baker pottering around within the matrix in The Deadly Assassin later that same year.

The only problem with this version of Deathlok is that he exists mainly for the sake of his post-apocalyptic environment and what it said about the present, as was, so he doesn't actually have much to do beyond a series of ambiguous missions, betrayals, and ensuing pontification. Buckler, Moench and others seemingly realised this and tried to jazz the story up with increasingly implausible twists, but only end up muddling things. Deathlok the Demolisher only ever needed to be a hero journey, or rather an antihero journey, in the same way that Heart of Darkness is about the progress more than the destination. Instead we find Deathlok restored to full humanity in a clone of his original body, except the cyborg body remains sentient so that now we have two of them. Then some minor point of continuity demands that this cyborg is only a copy of Deathlok, who has actually been elsewhere all along, following up some mission or other.

They should have quit while they were ahead but inevitably they didn't, so Deathlok returns a couple of years later to have adventures with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, which works about as well as would Frank Miller's Dark Knight travelling back in time to hang out with sixties telly Batman. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making Spiderman better, you're just making Deathlok worse. There were ten good issues before it all turned to shit and contradiction, but those issues were mostly amazing, Keith Pollard notwithstanding, and arguably unlike anything Marvel published before or since. Sometimes, no matter how good your intention, you just can't bring them back.