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Secret Wars II
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Legend has it that when Carol Kalish, Marvel's Direct Sales Manager at the time, announced at a retailers conference that they'd be doing a sequel to "Secret Wars" she was, at first, booed. In response to this she said "Let's be honest. Secret Wars was crap, right? But did it sell?"
The answer was "yes" to both questions!
"Secret Wars" might have been crap* (*it definitely was) but its sequel was much much worse, and was by far the worst series I've had to read for this entire project. There have been plenty of daft comics, unfunny comics, misfires and misjudgements along the way, but this series is entirely without anything to recommend it at all. Luckily for all of us, then, it hardly features Doctor Doom at all, restricting him to a few flashback sequences and a cameo in a crowd scene, so rather than force myself (and you, dear reader) to put up with several weeks of me moaning about how terrible it is I thought I'd save us all the trouble by looking at the whole thing in one go, focusing especially on Doom's sequences.
The first issue sees The Beyonder coming to Earth, assuming human form, and then wandering around causing chaos with extremely uninteresting and unamusing results. As with "Secret Wars" there's a huge amount of dialogue (with unusually tiny lettering to fit it all in) and all sorts of weird mixtures of confusing storyline, half-arsed cosmic ideas, and cack-handed attempts at relevance. It also features the hideous soppiness of Molecule Man and Volcana, which I'm sure was nobody's first choice for what they'd like to see continued from the original series, this time turned into a ghastly sitcom about two super-powered pillocks "hilariously" destroying things.
This is a Jim Shooter comic, so of course there is a recap of what's gone before, this time giving the whole story of the original "Secret Wars" in about eight panels, most of which feature Doctor Doom.
The recap makes it clear that Doom was a big part of "Secret Wars", so it's odd that he doesn't appear more often in the sequel. We don't see him again until the third issue, when he's there in another recap.
This issue is much the same as the first, with added attempts at ill-adivsed "relevance" as The Beyonder has a lengthy chat with a prostitute, a pimp and various hoodlums. It is Not Good.
One thing that is of interest (if you've read a lot of Doctor Doom stories anyway), is that the title of this story is "This World Is Mine!", which I guess might be a reference to "This Land Is Mine!" in Fantastic Four #247 (which could itself be a reference to the film This Land Is Mine), which again would seem weird as there's no link to Doctor Doom or really anything to do with that story.
Also of interest is the "Next time" panel at the very end of the story, which gives the reader detailed instructions for following the rest of the plot.
These panels appear at the end of every issue, including the final one where there are instructions on how to find the epilogue. We've occasionally seen this kind of thing before, especially when a series was ending before a storyline had finished and readers needed to be told where to find the continuation. However, we've never seen something with quite this many tasks before. Maybe that's why it's formatted in a typed font rather than standard comics lettering, so that the reader will view it as an Important and Official list of Things To Do and so be more likely to go out and buy all these extra comics. As we'll see in future weeks, tie-ins to this series were marked as such on the covers, so collecting them all was definitely something fans would be encouraged to do.
Doom next appears in issue 6, in a single panel as part of yet another recap.
This issue features more awful sitcom romance, some very rushed artwork, a huge amount of explanatory dialogue, and a whole bunch of Cosmic Beings which the omnipotent all-seeing Beyonder has taken the trouble to carefully label.
Doom's final appearance is in issue seven, "Charge Of The Dark Brigade", which has to be one of the stupidest titles for anything, ever. Mephisto has been plotting to copy Doctor Doom (shown in another recap image) and steal The Beyonder's power, which involves gathering together a "legion of Doom" consisting of all the baddies in the Marvel Universe.
This is Doctor Doom's first "in person" appearance in the series, yet he doesn't have a single line of dialogue throughout, even though he's on the cover.
He's just lumped in with everybody else like it's an issue of "Not Brand Echh" or something! It's very unusual for him to just be lumped in with other baddies like this - he's usually placed at the front of such gatherings - but it's even more puzzling to see him treated this way when he's been regularly mentioned as the only person who has been able to defeat The Beyonder before.
Also, how is Doom here at all? At this point he's still technically dead - as we'll soon see (SPOILERS!) The Beyonder will be instrumental in bringing him back into The Marvel Universe, but that's still a few months away, so how can he be here now? If I was chasing a No-Prize (and I'm always chasing a No-Prize!) I might suggest that this is a Doombot, but surely Mephisto wouldn't be fooled by a Doombot, and if he was summoning one on purpose wouldn't he summon up a whole bunch of them?
This sort of thing is precisely why I decided to look at these four issues all in one go, rather than one by one! It's all deeply awful, but thankfully that's the end of Doctor Doom in this series, although not the end of his interactions with The Beyonder. We'll be having a look at that soon enough, but next time we've got another visit to The X-Men, and another mysteriously sighting of the supposedly dead Doom!
link to information about this issue
posted 7/5/2021 by Mark Hibbett
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