Secret Wars

• 1. A Boast From Beyond

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  Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, usually shortened to Secret Wars, begins with a boast from a being who calls himself the Beyonder. He has just pulled heroes and supervillains off Earth against their will, and now he addresses them. "I am from beyond! Slay your enemies and all that you desire shall be yours! Nothing you dream of is impossible for me to accomplish!" That speech opens a twelve-issue Marvel Comics limited series about a war staged by a cosmic entity who has grown fascinated with Earth's superheroes. Behind the speech sits a stranger tale. Why would a toy company have a say in the title and even in the armor? Who fought on the planet, who betrayed whom, and who came closest to seizing the Beyonder's power? And why do readers and critics still argue about whether the series was any good?

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• 2. Toys and Titles

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  Marvel first announced the project as Cosmic Champions, in the eleventh issue of the Marvel Age news magazine. That issue was cover dated February 1984. The name did not survive a focus group run by Mattel, the toy maker. Children in the group responded well to the words "wars" and "secret," and so the series became Secret Wars.

  Mattel's influence went well beyond the title. It shaped both the storyline and the character designs. The armor of Doctor Doom and Iron Man was made more high-tech so that it would appeal to kids. Mattel also asked for new fortresses, vehicles and weapons, which would add play value and help sell playsets. The toy line itself ran as three waves of action figures, vehicles and accessories between 1984 and 1985. A role-playing game of the same name came from TSR, Inc.

  Jim Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief, conceived the series and wrote it, and he believed he was the only person capable of the job. The art came from Mike Zeck, Bob Layton and John Beatty. The twelve issues were published from May 1984 to April 1985.

  The war did not stay inside those twelve issues. Tie-ins appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man issues 249 to 252, The Uncanny X-Men issues 178 to 181, and The Thing issues 10 to 22. Others ran in The Avengers, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Marvel Team-Up and Thor. In 1987, Thor issue 383 was even presented as a previously untold tale from the series.

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• 3. Rosters and Skirmishes

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  Captain America, Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, Iron Man, She-Hulk, Thor, the Wasp and the Hulk make up the Avengers contingent on the Beyonder's planet. Three members of the Fantastic Four join them: the Human Torch, Mister Fantastic and the Thing. Spider-Man arrives as a solo hero. The X-Men send Colossus, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Professor X, Rogue, Storm, Wolverine and Lockheed the Dragon.

  On the other side stand the Absorbing Man, Doctor Doom, Doctor Octopus, the Enchantress, Kang the Conqueror, Klaw, the Lizard, the Molecule Man, Titania, Ultron, Volcana and the Wrecking Crew. The cosmic entity Galactus is counted among the villains, though he soon becomes non-aligned. Magneto is listed as a hero. When the Avengers question his presence, he too stops taking sides.

  The fighting starts before anyone lands. Galactus drains Ultron of energy, then confronts the Beyonder while Doctor Doom watches. Both are beaten and sent crashing down to the planet. Once everyone has arrived, Magneto walks away from the heroes feeling rejected. Kang blasts Doctor Doom all the way to the heroes' base after Doom tries to rally the villains.

  The heroes win the first skirmish, but Ultron, rebuilt by Doom, attacks them next. They turn on Magneto, who captures the Wasp and carries her to his fortress. Weather traps them both there, and the X-Men decide to join Magneto. Doom creates the villainesses Titania and Volcana, then leads a successful assault that buries the heroes' base under a mountain. Doom has Ultron kill Kang as payback. The Hulk, however, will soon be revealed to have saved everyone from that mountain.

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• 4. Doom Takes Everything

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  A village swept onto the planet stands in the path of Galactus, who has summoned his ship in order to consume the whole world. Everyone fights him. Doom's faction attacks the heroes at the same time, and Doom slips onto Galactus' ship, where he persuades Klaw to join the villains. Professor X pulls the X-Men back and has them strike at the villains, who are busy attacking volcanoes that Cyclops has set off.

  Quieter stories run beneath the battles. Colossus falls in love with an alien healer named Zsaji. The Wasp befriends the Lizard, then is gravely wounded by the Wrecking Crew, and Zsaji later revives her. The second Spider-Woman, Julia Carpenter, makes her first appearance. In the villains' base, the Hulk and Thor show Spider-Man an alien device they have used to recreate their clothing. Spider-Man finds a black costume and puts it on.

  Galactus begins to devour the planet. Mister Fantastic suggests letting him, since the Beyonder might then take away Galactus' eternal hunger. Everyone else talks him out of it. Back at the heroes' base, Doom uses Klaw's body to build a machine that absorbs Galactus' power, even after Galactus absorbs his own ship. With that new strength, Doom steals the Beyonder's power.

  The Molecule Man gathers the villains in Volcana's apartment. Doom summons the heroes to his new Tower of Doom, where he revives Kang and sends him back to his own time. He also reveals that Nova has taken Galactus away. When the heroes refuse to join him, he kills them all with a bolt. Zsaji brings them back at the cost of her own life.

  The survivors fight Klaw and the monsters he creates, Ultron among them. Klaw convinces Doom to use his powers again, and they spin out of control. The Wasp destroys Ultron. The Beyonder, who has possessed Klaw, takes back his power and teleports Doom and Klaw away. After Zsaji's funeral, Mister Fantastic builds a portal that can carry everyone home, and nearly all of them step through.

  The next tie-ins open right after the return. She-Hulk is about to replace a missing teammate, Colossus ends his romance with a heartbroken Kitty Pryde, and Ultron has injured the Hulk's leg.

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• 5. A Patchwork Planet

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  A suburb of Denver, Colorado, is one of the dozens of fragments the Beyonder joined together to build Battleworld. He took pieces from many planets so that every contestant would find an unfamiliar setting where powers could be used to the fullest. The method pulled in many people, both alien and human, who came along for the ride. That is how Spider-Woman ended up on the planet, and also how Zsaji arrived. She had brief romances with the Human Torch as well as with Colossus.

  After the Beyonder reclaimed his stolen power from Doom, cosmic energy infected the planet. Force of will could now alter reality there. The effect repaired Captain America's unbreakable shield and gave Mister Fantastic a way to send everyone home quickly. One explanation points to the Beyonder's nature as an incomplete Cosmic Cube, an object that lets its wielder reshape reality by will. Another suggests it was simply the "heart's desire" he had promised to the winners.

  Every hero left except Ben Grimm. On the planet's surface, he could change to and from his human form at will, and that was why he stayed. His adventures were told in a side-series, while She-Hulk took his place in the Fantastic Four. Ben defeated Ultron and slew Grimm the Sorcerer, a dark side of himself that had taken physical form. Once Ben went home, the planet had no more reason to exist, and it broke apart.

  No one knows whether every piece returned to its home planet. The Colorado fragment did make it back. The Molecule Man ferried it to Earth along with its citizens and the Secret Wars villains.

  Some of the planet's places came from Ben's own mind. Leenn, based on Latveria, was taken from the Thing's subconscious. There he fought the Wizard, a variation of Doctor Doom, and the whole location vanished when he destroyed the device the Wizard was guarding.

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• 6. Record Sales, Rough Reviews

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  Secret Wars sold more copies in 1984 than any other comic had in the previous 25 years. Critics of the time were far less impressed. They called the content uninspired and juvenile, and the commercial success did nothing to soften that verdict.

  Carol Kalish, Marvel's Direct Sales Manager at the time, announced a sequel series, Secret Wars II. Her announcement was first met with boos. She answered with a quote that has outlived the argument: "Let's be honest. Secret Wars was crap, right? But did it sell?"

  The verdict softened with time. In 2011, IGN listed the series among the best comic book events. Its writers enjoyed the action and the goofiness of the story. They also highlighted its effect on the Marvel Universe, which included the introduction of the symbiote and several new characters.

  That same year, Alex Zalben of MTV News ranked Secret Wars the second biggest comic event ever, behind only DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths. Zalben praised the story and its lasting effect on the Marvel universe. He also honored it as the "semi-official first Event Comics ever."

  The collectors' market agreed in its own way. In January 2022, Heritage Auctions sold an original page from the 1984 series for over $3 million. The page shows Spider-Man wearing the black suit for the first time.

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• 7. Four Battleworlds

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  The planet Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck created in 1984 turned out to be only the first Battleworld. A second one debuted in Beyond!, a six-issue series from 2006 by Dwayne McDuffie and Scott Kolins. The Stranger built it while posing as the Beyonder, hoping to study combatants from Earth under the guise of battle. It ended when the irate Stranger departed. Gravity held the planet together long enough for his group to escape, and it cost him his life. Epoch later resurrected Gravity as the new Protector of the Universe.

  The third Battleworld arrived in May 2015, in a Secret Wars series by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic. The core series ran nine issues over eight months and ended in January 2016. It followed the destruction of the Multiverse, brought on by incursions. Doctor Doom, the Molecule Man and Doctor Strange had defied the godlike Beyonders behind the catastrophe. Doom defeated them with a secret weapon made from a multitudinous number of Molecule Men, then salvaged the remaining realities and merged them into a new planet.

  There, residents with wiped minds worshipped Doom as God Emperor. In truth, the Molecule Man had absorbed the Beyonders' power, and Doom was only borrowing it. To hide this, Doom kept the Molecule Man out of sight and claimed he had died.

  This Battleworld was split into domains, each ruled by a Baron or Baroness, and travel between them required special permission. Greenland was a desert wasteland of Hulks. Marville was home to child versions of the Avengers and the X-Men. New Quack City was filled with anthropomorphic animals, with Howard as its only human. The Thor Corps served as police. The Human Torch orbited the planet as a small sun, and Knowhere acted as its moon.

  Three domains held threats that could destroy the rest: the Deadlands, Perfection and New Xandar. A giant version of Ben Grimm, called the Shield, walled them off. One of the core miniseries, Ultimate End, ended the Ultimate Marvel imprint after 15 years. It was written by Brian Michael Bendis, with art by Mark Bagley, the team that had started that imprint with Ultimate Spider-Man. This Battleworld collapsed when Doom's power was transferred to Reed Richards, who both Doom and the Molecule Man considered worthier.

  A fourth Battleworld appeared in 2025, in Battleworld issue 1 by Christos N. Gage and Marcus To. The villain Korvac made it while trying to fix an anomaly in the timeline, smashing realms from across the multiverse together. Korvac governed the city of Forest Hills and handpicked heroes and villains from across space and time to fight their own Secret Wars. He was also hiding his power from the tyrannical God Emperor Doom.

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• 8. Sequels and Retellings

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  Secret Wars II arrived one year after the original. The Beyonder visited Earth, and the story had a tie-in with almost every Marvel comic book being written at the time. A third story, written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Keith Pollard, ran in Fantastic Four issues 318 and 319 in September and October 1988.

  Later retellings poked at the original. In 2010, the all-ages, non-canonical miniseries Spider-Man & the Secret Wars told the story from Spider-Man's side. In it he receives the Beyonder's power and creates New Parker City. During the 2015 event, the four-issue Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars retold the original series from Deadpool's point of view. The Wasp accidentally made everyone forget his involvement, which explained away the inconsistencies. In November 2023, a four-issue Battleworld miniseries marked the 40th anniversary, starring Spider-Man and the Human Torch. It claimed to expose never-before-told secrets of the 1984 storyline.

  Issues of What If? imagined other outcomes. In Brave New World, by Jay Faerber and Gregg Schigiel, the heroes are stranded after Galactus and the Beyonder destroy each other. Children are born with inherited powers, among them Bravado, son of Thor and the Enchantress, and Malefactor, son of Doctor Doom and the Enchantress. Malefactor plots to take over the planet, and the young heroes stop him. In another universe, Doom simply keeps the Beyonder's power and takes over the universe.

  The story reached other screens too. A three-part episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series took inspiration from it. The X-Men of the other animated show were meant to appear, but the cost of transportation from Canada to Los Angeles proved too high, so most were dropped. The Hulk and She-Hulk were excluded because The Incredible Hulk aired on UPN. The fourth season of Avengers Assemble, titled Avengers: Secret Wars, also drew on it.

  Battleworld appears in the games Marvel Contest of Champions and its 2020 spin-off Marvel Realm of Champions. Alex Irvine wrote a novelization in 2016. A film, Avengers: Secret Wars, is in development and is scheduled for release on the 17th of December 2027.

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