Saturday, September 7, 2019

Secret Wars Too, #1


This comedic one-shot tie-in to Marvel's 2015-16 Secret Wars event was a bit of a disappointment. Over the year's Marvel had developed a number of 'Not Brand Echh' style parodies of their annual massive event story lines. Many of them have been quite funny. But not this time around.

The main story is a metaphysical story in which Secret Wars scribe, Jonathan Hickman has just finished pitching the idea to Marvel's think tank to great success. However, Hickman realizes that he doesn't have a clue how it's going to end. Enter Doctor Victor Von Doom for a funny pep talk that goes off an a great tangent about hot dogs. 

Unfortunately, this story is peppered with jokes about how the issues in the miniseries will not ship on time as well as groaners about too many tie-in comics. My question is: If Marvel knows that this is a problem, why do they repeat themselves time and time again?

The other stories in this book were pretty forgettable. There's a yarn about how not killing off Uncle Ben would actually be one of the worst follies to ever befall the Marvel multiverse. Aside from the clever puns of alternate Peter Parker heroic personas, it was a stupid story. A tale involving the tragic character of D-Man was naturally quite sad. We also had a couple of episodes involving a universe of Bear Marvel heroes and the computer hacking adventures of Spidey, Jessica Jones and Daredevil that started out great but got ridiculous pretty quick. 

Only the dimension shifting adventures of Kate Bishop and America in their quest for something called 'pizza' and a Eric Powell parody on a reality series starring Doctor Doom were back-ups in this one-shot that were any good. 

An excellent question is posed thanks to the last story: why hasn't Marvel signed The Goon creator, Powell, to any sort of contract. I bet something by him and Donny Cates would kick serious booty!

Thankfully, I only paid a buck for this book. Quite a disappointment really. But it's from the Axel Alonso era. So could you expect anything less?

Rating: 5 out of 10 stars.

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