Volume 06+07: Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars

Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars

Author: Jim Shooter  |  Illustrators: Mike Zeck / Bob Layton

"You remind me of a lady bouncer I used to know."

The first arc in the series to feature a large crossover event and also the first to be split over two volumes. That's as exciting as it gets.

A powerful entity whisks a bus-load of heroes and villains away from their usual surroundings and deposits them on an alien world to do battle. Many of the good guys can be seen on the cover of the book (left), so I won't go over them all again. The bad guys are Dr Doom, Doctor Octopus, Ultron the Gobshite, and a few more B-Listers that would get paid buttons if it was a film and not a comic they were in.

By the end of Part 1 (Volume 06) I was of the opinion that maybe the Secret War should've stayed secret, like a shame, because it hadn't managed to do anything worthwhile in that time. It was originally a monthly comic, so after six issues (six months!) you'd expect at least something worth the time taken to collect and read them. Nope.

It mentions in the back on the book that it was originally conceived as a way to promote a joint Marvel and Mattel toy line (Mattel were the folks who produced Masters of the Universe). The actual story was a secondary concern. That explains a lot. It's a multi-part advert.

Rarely does anyone just speak in Marvel comics, they exclaim everything. When dialogue flows nicely it can detract from the overuse, but SW's is so awful that it heightened my awareness of it. I didn't hunt for the best example to prove a point, I simply chose one random page and this is what I got: two people in a room together, no one else around, six panels of equal size, twenty-five exclamation marks. There's a fine line between adding drama and being outright ridiculous. Jim Shooter left that line in tatters. It's fucking stupid.

When it was time to read Part 2 (Volume 07) I was close to despondency but determined to continue. And, thank the gods of turnaround, things improved. The fighting was still tedious but wasn't always just filler - there was actual consequences this time, some of which were continued into each hero's respective individual title. A few of the protagonists even had their emotional state altered or affected. Bloody hell! Secret Wars had justified it's existence. (But that doesn't exonerate it, because it's still crap and could've easily achieved the same result in 6 or 7 issues.)

Volume 06 collects together Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars #1-6; Volume 07 collects #7-12.

Verdict: