Brace yourselves, Marvel fans, because the entire comic universe is due for another massive explosion, and it will never be the same again.
At least, that's what Marvel Comics would want you to believe.
Jonathan Hickman, one of the writers for the Avengers series, is set to spearhead the upcoming company-wide Secret Wars event where superheroes and supervillains will duke it out in a colossal battle that will change time and space itself.
Marvel says that Secret Wars will be the culmination of their five-year plan and that it will be the biggest event in the comic book company's 76-year history.
'Secret Wars'
In a recent interview, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso shared a few insights as to how the idea behind Secret Wars came about.
"This event has been years in the making, and it started with an idea that Jonathan had prior to writing The Avengers [in 2009]," Alonso said.
"We saw it as an opportunity to transform the Marvel universe in a way that quite frankly we've never done before. So, all of our ships, so to speak, would be pointed in one direction—towards this event."
Alonso also explained the similarities the upcoming event will have with the original Secret Wars launched in 1984.
"The long and short of it is that this event shares a title and shares some cosmetic similarities to the original Secret Wars, most notably this place called Battleworld," he said.
"But it's an entirely new story and an entirely different story, set up by completely different inciting events."
Alonso added that the new world they are envisioning will have the characters they "cherry picked" to survive in a new and very dangerous environment.
Regarding questions of whether or not the new Secret Wars can be considered a reboot of the Marvel multiverse more so than the characters themselves, Alonso had this to say:
"It's ultimately for the readers to decide what they're seeing. What I will say is that we don't believe our continuity or our universe is broken. We don't believe it needs to be fixed. And I think that this story will bear that out."
Alonso also stressed that Secret Wars will be structured as to allow people who may not have read a comic book for quite a while to easily understand what is going on in the story.
"Jonathan and Esad [Ribic]'s story is structured in a way that should be completely understandable to anyone who went to see, say, The Avengers movies," Alonso pointed out.
"[It] begins clean, and moves upwards cinematically, and readers will understand who the players are, what the inciting incident is, [and] the stakes."
Secret Wars will unfold in three parts.
The first part, Last Days, will begin in May, and it will feature what the characters will do during their last days before the big event. Some of the heroes to be featured heavily in this initial part are Black Widow and the new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan.
The next will be Battleworld, where the books describe what the world would be like in the aftermath. Imagine a combination of the worlds shown in Age of Ultron and in Marvel Zombies.
The third part will be Warzone, which according to Alonso, is about a single domain that can stand on its own whether the reader has read Hickman and Ribic's main series.
"Those stories are [about] picking moments of our biggest and brightest—and in some cases most controversial—stories, and having some fun with our core characters," the Marvel EIC added.
At the end of the Secret Wars event in fall, Marvel hopes new fans would be able to get into the universe in more ways.
"The beauty of Secret Wars is that it opens up the opportunity for us to explore a lot of genres that we haven't been able to explore for a while," Alonso said.
"You know, Captain America, Iron Man, all viewed as Western archetypes. Those and more are the kinds of series that will start in Secret Wars and they'll be joined by new series post-Secret Wars, when the story reveals new opportunities for us to reveal new material. Both genre-wise and for the characters themselves."
Previous Company-wide Events
For long-time fans of both DC and Marvel comic titles, universe-spanning events such as Secret Wars is no longer a new thing.
DC Comics has recently wrapped up two consecutive world-altering crises in the past five years, with Flashpoint sparking the creation of The New 52 universe and the subsequent Convergence establishing a new status quo.
Marvel, for its part, introduced its own shakeup with Marvel NOW!, but instead of a complete reboot of ongoing story arcs and character origins, Marvel somehow implemented an update of current superteam rosters and also paved the way for the introduction of new lead characters.
Some of the more well-known aftermath of the launching of Marvel NOW! is the creation of the Uncanny Avengers, which features a team consisting of Avengers and X-Men members, Captain Marvel, where the superheroine Ms. Marvel, Carold Danvers, finally assumes the mantle of the cosmic hero, and Thanos Rising, an in-depth retelling of the origins of the mad titan Thanos.
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