Today, Spencer, Patrick and Drew discuss Secret Wars 4, Red Skull 1, A-Force 2, Giant-Sized Little Marvel AvX 2, Ultimate End 3, Years of Future Past 2, and Secret Wars Journal 3.

Spencer: One thing that’s always bothered me about line-wide crossovers is when the tie-ins are forced to incorporate certain elements whether it makes sense or not. I can’t help but think of the earthquake in all 40 of the second issues of Convergence, or that month where every single DC comic released had to feature a fight with an OMAC — besides being creatively stifling, it makes all the books start to feel way too similar. With that in mind, what I’ve appreciated the most about Secret Wars is the sheer variety found in its tie-ins. All these books have in common is that they’re all set on Battleworld — other than that, they’re free to do whatever they please. This week’s offerings feature everything from the inner workings of Doom’s mind and Battleworld’s politics to zany childhood shenanigans — it’s a fun change of pace from the typical crossover, and in fact, the only real disappointments to be found may be the titles that don’t take enough advantage of their setting.

Secret Wars 4

Spencer: When talking about issue 3, I predicted that things would get nasty once God Doom realized that Reed Richards had landed on Battleworld. That’s exactly what happens in Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic’s Secret Wars 4, but I suppose the fact that this conflict would come down to Richards vs. Doom was always guaranteed — what’s more surprising is the fallout of their confrontation. From the clarifications to New Avengers‘ murky finale — Doom did destroy the Beyonders (though I still don’t understand how), and he’s actually achieved God-like power, something I wasn’t so certain of before this — to Strange’s decision to betray Doom (made all the more compelling by the time Hickman spent building a relationship between these two men), the second half of this issue is just momentous event after momentous event. What all these events boil down to, though, is the old world vs. the new, made all the more pertinent by the new Marvel universe we know is coming post-Secret Wars.

Doom made Battleworld, but that doesn’t make it his forever, and the same can be said of the original architects of the Marvel universe. I saw an article the other day where Stan Lee said that Peter Parker should always be white and straight — I’m not going to get into that debate, but I had to wonder to myself why Lee had any say in the issue. Sure he co-created Peter, but Peter’s changed and evolved over the past five decades; he belongs to all the creators who have worked on him since then just as much as he does Lee. The same will happen to Battleworld, which only naturally will evolve beyond Doom’s control, and the same can also be said of the Marvel Universe. Doom represents those holding onto the old universe, those unwilling to change, while Reed and Cyclops/Phoenix are those championing change — and as powerful as Doom is, change cannot be stopped.

Of course, that metaphor starts to fall apart a bit when I remember that Doom is fighting for a new world while Richards is literally trying to save the original Marvel Universe, but I think the broad strokes of my argument still fit. How about you, Patrick?

Patrick: Well, time out Spencer: that’s only half true: we do have two Reed Richardses running around Battleworld. Hickman is careful to point this out, and even goes so far as to suggest that Doom had never saved other versions of Reed from throughout the multiverse. For as much as the other heroes are being iterated on, it seems like the Fantastic Four are in short supply. But these two Reed Richardses represent both preserving and destroying the old universes. So, maybe it just makes the metaphor messier, but that’s more fun, right?

It’s nice to see Secret Wars veering more into New Avengers territory, as this series is now starting to set the infinitely powerful against each other and forcing their moralities to rub up against each other. Or, y’know, put each other in a one-hand choke-hold, whichever the case may be. I’m not sure there’s a much better choice of artist than Esad Ribic to render these guys — every panel is like a painting of a Greek god. Seriously, that drawing of Doom and Cyclops might be the single most awesome thing to come out of this event.

After years of set-up, Hickman has so many piece primed for explosions just like this. I can’t wait to see the potential of this series fully realized in the weeks to come.

Red Skull 1

Patrick: Potential be damned! Some of these Secret Wars tie-ins are just going to be the same old story with different specifics. Red Skull 1 has the fairly vanilla set-up of one person recruiting a bunch of shady characters against their will for a suicide mission. It’s basically Suicide Squad or Thunderbolts, but without the super compelling characters at the center. Filling the Amanda Waller / Thaddeus Ross role is Crossbones — a character about whom I know very little, other than he’s one of Red Skull’s cronies. But never mind that: within the context of Secret Wars, he has defected from Red Skull’s army for reasons that are, in themselves, a strange inversion of who Red Skull is. I never realized before how much the Captain America mythology leans on real American history to establish the characters’ values, allegiances and sense of right and wrong, but removing Red Skull and Crossbones from that context reveals just how generic they are. And Crossbones is made all the more generic by teaming him up with the more random team of villains (from the A-List to… Jack O’Lantern) I’ve ever seen.

And it turns out that they’re mostly just canon fodder for the denizens of the Deadlands anyway. I don’t know, Drew, do you think the series is taking cheap shots by focusing on Electro in the first couple pages only to have him eaten by a zombie version of himself in the final couple pages? Is that hardcore or formulaic? I leaning towards the latter.

Drew: I actually think it’s kind of clever. I totally agree that the issue seems like it’s setting up yet another Dirty Dozen knock-off, but that made the twist of everyone getting eaten all the more pleasing. This obviously won’t be the story of how a rag-tag group of bad guys learn the value of teamwork. Actually, I have no idea what this story will be. I’ll admit that that may be a failing of this bait-and-switch structure, but I was amused enough to come back. The title of this series makes it clear that Red Skull will be safe (for the time being, anyway), but clearly nobody else is.

A-Force 2

Spencer: Just like its first issue, A-Force 2 is focused on finding the menace behind the strange portals popping up all over Arcadia and debating the morality of America’s punishment (and ever handing her over to Doom in the first place). Fortunately, all those elements are made far more interesting by the inclusion of a battle with a Sentinel. Marguerite Bennett, G. Willow Wilson, and Jorge Molina craft a battle that’s a pure visual spectacle, and which uses all its characters and their abilities wisely — seriously, that three-pronged attack from She-Hulk, Medusa, and Captain Marvel is a thing of genius. Molina’s art makes even the moments outside the battle a joy to read — his acting especially brings to life the unnamed star-field girl Nico finds, a character who never speaks but whose joy and enthusiasm for life shines through loud and clear in the art.

A lot of the conflicts in play throughout this issue are ones also being handled in other Secret Wars tie-ins, but as a showcase for Marvel’s coolest ladies to demonstrate just how skilled and powerful they truly are, I’d say it’s a success.

Patrick: Oh, speaking of Marvel’s coolest ladies — I thought the star child was some variation on Captain Universe, but I’m realizing that may have been a baseless assumption on my part. Whoever she is, the creative team has a great sense of humor funneling through the character, as she smiles her way through that sentinel attack. I suppose it comes part and parcel with being an infinitely powerful creature, but the look on her face right before the sentinel tries to stomp on her head is priceless.

I still find myself wishing that this series had teamed these characters up on a more tame version of Earth. Some of the kingdoms of Battleworld make sense, and some are straight-up bonkers, but this is something in between. Namor and his submarinistresses discover a portal that seems to connect the Kingdoms, so maybe part of the point is that this series — and its characters — are having a hard time reconciling all these disparate characters, tones and concepts.

Giant-Sized Little Marvel AvX 2

Spencer: Since I started working for Retcon Punch I’ve come to notice that my favorite titles are often the hardest to write about. There are some titles that are just so good that it feels pointless to sing their praises after a while, and others so dense and rich with meaning that I struggle to unpack them. Other times, though, I struggle for a different reason: sometimes a book is just so genuinely fun that our typical analytical devices simply don’t apply. This is the case with Skottie Young’s Giant-Sized Little Marvel AvX 2, a book that pits child versions of the two titular teams against each other in an endless escalating rivalry. The story this month is formatted a bit strangely, as it opens on a dodgeball game that’s super fun, but completely unrelated to last month’s cliffhanger, but then picks up that cliffhanger immediately afterwards, but also wanders off on some tangents following various minor characters home from school for the day. It’s an odd bit of pacing I would probably criticize in any other title, but every stray aside and one-off joke is just so funny that I simply don’t care if they feel tangental. This isn’t a title that we’re meant to dig deep into and study — new students Zachary and Zoe (who seem to fill a bit of an audience surrogate role) actually teach us exactly how to read it:

Yup, this is a story that’s best appreciated when you just sit back, make some popcorn, pick a side to root for, and watch the battle unfold. That approach couldn’t work with every title — if a book isn’t quality, people won’t be so willing to accept it as-is — but it helps Giant Sized Little Marvel AvX soar. This book is clever, charming, well-drawn, and cram-packed with jokes that all land; it’s an absolute delight.

Ultimate End 3

Drew: Comics are generally a pretty positive medium. Sure, there’s violence, and the universe is threatened on a semi-regular basis, but the heroes are generally able to save the day — it’s how their publishers stay in business. That leaves Ultimate End in an unusually pessimistic spot — the fact that this is the end of the Ultimate Universe is right there in the series title. Last month’s issue found some optimism, particularly as 616 Tony was able to tame his inner demons represented by Ultimate Tony, but issue 3 is decidedly more negative. Turns out, there isn’t much you can change to grittily reboot Frank Castle, so those characters learn nothing from one another. Ultimate Punisher kills 616 Punisher, then goes on a kind of clocktower shooting spree.

That friction-leading-to-disastrous-results also plays out in Banner’s explanation of how the two Hulks came to blows. Turns out Ultimate Banner is much more pessimistic about whatever help a Hulk can offer the world. Unfortunately, after their battle, Ultimate Fury is inclined to agree, and keeps 616 Banner locked up to prevent anything else from happening. Of course, 616 Tony devises a way to get Banner out, which only highlights the opposing attitudes between the Ultimates and the 616 Avengers. I suppose I always knew that the Ultimate Universe was a bit grittier and darker than the 616 Universe, but it took injecting some 616-ers to appreciate how joyless that pessimism can make its stories.

Spencer: The thing is, Bendis has generally always had a far more optimistic approach to the Ultimate Universe than most of its other creators (his Ultimate Spider-Man served as an antidote to the nihilistic, often gory Ultimates). That even he has to admit how pessimistic the Ultimate incarnations of these characters are compared to their 616 counterparts shows how off-the-rails the Ultimate Universe had gone — outside of Bendis’ Spider books, it’s a universe that’s spent the past few years almost solely defined by horrific disaster after horrific disaster. The fact that these characters are never going to get a chance to rise above this — their universe is coming to an end — is yet another subversion of Marvel’s typical happy endings.

It’s a bummer, but there’s probably no writer more appropriate than Bendis to tell this story, and it’s not just because he’s written for the Ultimate imprint throughout its entire history. Notice how little plot this series has — the encounter with the Thors in the first issue essentially establishes the conflict as “learn to get along or figure out how to separate these two universes,” but this is mostly ignored until the final page of issue 3. Instead, the focus is simply on conversation and character interactions, and this is where Bendis excels. Maybe it’s a little anticlimactic that the Ultimate universe is coming to an end in such a low-key fashion, but considering the hand all of the universe’s previous “end of the world” stories had in its downfall, it feels appropriate to instead focus on the differences that defined this universe, be they for better or for worse.

Years of Future Past 2

Drew:  The first issue of Years of Future Past impressed us with its skillful balance between pessimism and optimism — its setting is oppressively bleak, but there were enough character moments shining through to keep the story from becoming a slog. Issue two further emphasizes that balance, putting Christina and Cameron on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Christina horrified at the way Cameron killed the Blob in the previous issue. Much of this issue finds them discussing the morality of power, but nothing puts a finer point on it than the monologue Colossus gives halfway through the issue. It’s a ton of text, almost intimidating on the page, but it carefully walks us through how casual jokes can escalate to systemic hate. It’s not optimistic unto itself, but that monologue puts everyone on the same page in time to face some more straightforward threats: Doom Sentinels. Their solution is just as comic book-y, but I can’t wait to see how it plays out next month.

Secret Wars Journal 3

Patrick: What I love about these kind of anthology series is that they get to ask one of my favorite narrative questions: “if this is true, what else is true?” The second of these stories is written by Comedy Bang Bang! host Scott Aukerman, and while it features great tossed off jokes about residents of Greenland hulking from minor offenses to their decency, the story really picks up when Aukerman, though the lens of therapist Doc Sampson, explores the emotional realities of living in a world populated entirely by hulks. After an opening that trades in HULKSMASH jokes, the tenor changes when a young Peter Parker comes in for his 1:30 appointment. What comes next is a shockingly honest exploration of how disempowering anger can really be. The story’s most potent image, also ends up being the funniest:

This is almost an extension of Banner’s admission that “I’m always angry” in The Avengers. The truth is that everyone feels anger, even those that seem to have their shit together.

The first story is also a neat little murder mystery that wraps itself up with startling efficiency. It’s not quite as revelatory as the Doc Sampson story, but writer Frank Tieri wields all the tools in his multiversal toolkit to craft one hell of a mystery. Incidentally, I’m sorta surprised by how many of these anthology stories use Punisher. Frank Castle may be one of those characters who is more interesting in concept than when actually explored.

Did you read some Secret Wars tie-ins that we didn’t? Sure you did! There are holes in our pull list. Holes that you’re encouraged to fill with your comments. Let’s keep talking about Secret Wars.