Marvel have prided themselves on the fact that they've never done a huge, line-spanning reboot. Mainly because their Distinguished Competition do it all the time, are almost obsessive with tidying up their history, ever since the classic 1985 Crisis On Infinite Earths that pared down DC's huge collection of alternate universes into just one. Nice and simple. So it's time to eat a hearty amount of crow, because that's exactly what Marvel are doing with Secret Wars. Thanks to universe-hopping heroes like the Exiles, decades of What If? stories positing alternate endings to famous storylines and past events like Age Of Apocalypse, there are a lot of different realities in the Marvel multiverse. And all of them will cease to exist as of Secret Wars. The biggest deal here is that their Ultimate Comics line will be coming to an end with the aptly-named Ultimate End, where Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley kill off the universe they helped start. But their Spider-Man, teenage Miles Morales, might well find a way out alive regardless of all of that...
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/
