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... Nothing To Fear!
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At last, after what feels like YEARS of slogging through it, we've finally reached the final issue of "Secret Wars", and it feels like a grand summary of everything that's gone before. There's talking! Excessive recapping! Some BIG FIGHTS! A queasy mixture of domesticity and grim'n'gritty! And, of course plenty of Doctor Doom - look, there he is on the cover again!
We're used to seeing these sort of covers, with the villain apparently victorious over a mountain of dead heroes, but when we turn the page we find that this is not a dream, nor a hoax, imaginary story or even over-enthusiastic cover image, but the actual truth: the heroes are all dead. Jim Shooter goes to great lengths to make this clear, listing them all one by one over scenes of devastation, presumably to counteract any smart-arse reader going "Aha! you missed out Spider-Woman!"
It's like a "What If?" but real, they're definitely dead, or "carrion" as Jim Shooter puts it. As has happened so many times with this series, there's a weird mis-match of tone as Shooter tries to get in on the new mood of "gritty" comics, using a phrase like "blood oozing from the mangled remains of their flesh" in a series which, when it comes down to it, is designed to sell a range of action figures.
Thankfully we move away from all the death to find Doctor Doom back in his new base, having just zapped all of the superheroes. For some reason using his powers makes him increase in size, and we catch him just as he's shrinking down to normal again.
Doom is quoting Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita (yes, I googled it) in an attempt to convey the magnitude of his problems - he has ultimate power, so has to be really careful not to obliterate a solar system by accident. If I had that sort of power I am pretty sure I would "accidentally" obliterate Klaw, who is still doing the incredibly annoying end of words thing-ing-ing, but instead Doom goes for a bit of a sit down in his batchelor pad/Doomcave.
Next comes a lengthy segment dealing with the super-villains, still flying through space on a big chunk of Denver. A lot of this section is taken up with The Enchantress summoning up a Water Spirit in the bath for a recap and, it turns out, a complete explanation of how The Beyonder got started.
It's VERY in keeping with the tone of this series that we get this cosmic information from an Asgardian water elemental sitting in a bathtub next to a bottle of shampoo. Mixing the cosmic with the down to earth was one of the key aspects of early Marvel, especially when it's (respectably) Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, but in Shooter's hands it just feels a bit naff!
After telling the Enchantress a whole lot of stuff she already knows (Shooter is still doing these recaps - who does he think is buying the final issue of a 12 issue series as their first one?) the water spirit gets boiled alive and then sent down the plughole, all while The Absorbing Man is waiting to get in to use the loo.
We stay in Denver for several more pages during which the villains bicker a lot more and fight each other for various sensible and also not at all sensible reasons. Doctor Octopus,for instance, decides to fight Molecule Man - who, let's not forget, has put the whole suburb in a space bubble and sent it flying through the galaxy - for claiming to be able to get them home, when surely a) that's a good thing and b) he can pretty clearly do it. It all goes on for ages, and ends with The Lizard getting killed, the Enchantress going back to Asgard, and the other villains... er... actually, we don't ever find out what happens to them. It's one huge plotline running throughout the series that just seems to get dropped and forgotten.
Instead we go back to Doctor Doom, getting woken up from a nap by Klaw, who has been busy working on his Secret Wars fanfic. He tells Doom a whole made-up story about how the superheroes could have escaped being dead. Zsaji could have turned up and used all of her powers to bring Colossus back to life. He could then have found Mr Fantastic's body and put it into an alien healing machine, and if that somehow worked Mr Fantastic could then have worked out a way to make all the other superheroes be alive again.
Doctor Doom is quite right, this is clearly nonsense and nowhere near as good as Klaw's Harry Potter/Battlestar Galactica mash-ups. However, Klaw continues to taunt him with the possibility that it might be true and/or that he might accidentally revive them himself, at which point Thor's hammer flies through the door and Doom FLIPS OUT.
I'm not entirely clear what's going on there - is this Battleworld exploding (a bit)? If so, where is that sun, and how come there's stars all of a sudden? The Beyonder extinguished all the stars in the nearby sky, as we were reminded only a few pages ago. Maybe it's just due to the multitude of inkers being used - John Beatty is the only one actually credited, but as we get into the second half of this story it becomes clear that a lot more artists have been drafted in, presumably to get it all finished in time. They change every couple of pages, with very differing results. For instance, as the somehow-revived superheroes (we don't get a proper explanation for how they really came back to life) approach his base Doom gives a tiny sliver of Power Cosmic to Klaw, so that he can do the fighting while Doom goes and has a bit of a lie down. Klaw uses this power to generate an army of monsters in a good old-fashioned two page splash.
I think the lack of dialogue and sound effects is meant to show how awesome this image is, but to be honest it looks a bit knocked-off in a hurry. I do like Mike Zeck's art, especially on Captain America, but here it looks really plain. I never thought I'd say it, but I really miss a bit of 90s super-detailed "scratchy lines" art here. Luckily, we get exactly that with the change of inker on the next page!
After several pages of fighting Captain America makes his way into Doom's batchelor pad, where he gets killed again. And again. And again!
I've no idea what's going on, but the upshot is that Doctor Doom is sufficiently weakened for The Beyonder to finally make his move. Yes, The Beyonder! It turns out that he's been hiding inside Klaw for ages, having been passed there by Spider-Woman via Hulk in previous issues. So that's what was going on! The Beyonder takes back his power and vanishes, pausing only to revert Doctor Doom to his previous costume and disappearing him too.
And that's kind of it, for Doom and The Beyonder anyway. The superheroes go back to Doombase, where Mr Fantastic pops off to find a way to send them all home.
Hang on, "find a way to get us home"? Didn't he say, just last issue, that he could definitely do this, and that there was no need for anyone to ask Doctor Doom to do it? Was Mr Fantastic just making this up then? What a git!
The rest of the issue is a massive exercises in tidying up - it's easy to forget, reading it now, but a lot of the ending of this story was already set up a year previously when the heroes returned to Earth in their own series. The Hulk was shown returning with a broken leg, for instance, and so that has to be quickly established here.
Once again, there's a distinct feeling that Jim Shooter is rushing around fixing things that he should have sorted out ages ago. The fact that Hulk has a broken leg is quite a big deal in his own series, and I'd imagine readers at the time would have spent a while wondering how this came to be. Turns out he broke his leg in a fight, and that's all. It's a bit disappointing, even though it's followed by a little scene between Hawkeye and Hulk that eerily predicts the ending of "Civil War II" several decades later.
Similarly, lots of heroes came back with slightly different costumes, just like Spider-man did, and it turns out that the story behind this was: they just got some slightly different costumes made. Again, this must have been a bit of a let-down - apart from anything else, one would have hoped there was some reason behind Professor X getting the most horrible costume EVER.
Yikes! Lockheed comes back at last, The Lizard turns human, and Mr Fantastic theorises that all this "wish fulfilment" is not just a plot contrivance, but actually "residual energy which seems to respond to strong desire, or force of will." That's handy isn't it? Captain America uses this to fix his shield, and I guess Mr Fantastic uses it as a way to get himself out of the hole he's dug himself, because on the next page he's developed a remote control teleporter device that will send everybody home.
Handily, this will send everyone back to where they originally came from in Central Park, unless the creative team on that characters regular series twelve months ago originally had them returning somewhere else, in which case "it will project individuals to any destination they concentrate on". Handy!
Everyone gets sent back, including weepy creepy Colossus who, quite frankly, I have had more than enough of. He goes with the X-Men, whose transport is somehow effected by an "energy fluctuation."
This has absolutely no effect on anybody else, so I can only assume that it's done to tie up with however the X-Men were shown returning a year before. That only leaves one last item of business to tie up, with She-Hulk joining the Fantastic Four to replace The Thing. I was reading The Fantastic Four at the time and I distinctly remember this new version of the FF returning to Earth and acting like She-Hulk had been in the team for ages.
However, it turns out to have all just happened at the last minute. I'm not complaining (for a change!), I bloody loved that era of Fantastic Four, and though The Thing has always been my favourite superhero it was a great move bringing She-Hulk in. It just feels a bit of a let-down again to have the whole reason for her joining being "because The Thing fancied some time off". That's what happens though - Ben Grimm wants to stick around for a while to enjoy his ability to change back to human form, and so the whole series ends with the rest of the FF departing, leaving Ben behind, sitting on a rock like a superheroic Oor Wully.
A very low-key, very "Secret Wars" ending! As I said at the start of this recap, the issue as a whole neatly encapsulates the series as a whole - massively half-arsed and rushed with far too much talking, odd endings, incomprehensible plots and slightlly disappointing artwork, written with a queasy mix of domestic sitcom and "dark" "adult" storytelling. If I've not been clear up to this point, let me spell it out: it really is terrible, and I'm very glad it's all over!
Next time we're back in the ongoing Marvel universe with... oh dear. It's "Beauty And The Beast" again!
link to information about this issue
posted 1/4/2021 by Mark Hibbett
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