10 Problems With Marvel's Secret Wars Nobody Wants To Admit
5. You Need To Do A Lot Of Back-Reading
Everything ends is the tag line of Secret Wars, implying the ultimate bookend to the Marvel Universe that's been in existence since the early sixties. While technically true, the more immediate meta-story that it's drawing to a close is the one writer Jonathan Hickman has been telling in absolutely all of his work for the publisher so far. For somebody who has devoured Hickman's Fantastic Four (which featured Doctor Doom and his universe-saving powers heavily) or Avengers (which is where the whole collapsing-multiverse thing began) is hugely gratifying. For somebody who is less familiar with literally hundreds of issues...it's a lot less so. In fact, Secret Wars #1 was so tied to Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers books that it continued immediately from scenes featured in them. To make any sense of the alliances and rivalries in play, of the themes and plot twists, in the roads that lead to Secret Wars, you're expected to do thousands of pages of back-reading.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
