The Marvel Universe is about to e.x.p.l.o.d.e. For months now the company has been teasing at their next big crossover event, due to begin next summer, both literally - there have been countless mysterious images slowly doled out to the comics press as of late - and in-universe, mostly in the pages of Jonathan Hickman's Avengers series. It's there that the mainstream Marvel universe has suffered a number of "incursions" - unwelcome visitors from alternate realities. Then there are the time-travelling younger selves meeting the older X-Men, and the Ultimate universe's Spider-Man Miles Morales making his way to meet the original web crawler. Just what is going on here? Hickman's actually been building to all this since his run on Fantastic Four (all the way back in 2009), and Marvel have done a good job keep their mouths shut. Especially when they started teasing their next event with covers for series like Civil War and Planet Hulk - which, duh, we've already read those, dummies. Turns out this is all gonna culminate in Secret Wars, a riff on the classic eighties miniseries which saw superheroes and villains transported to the alien Battleworld. Where they...did battle. As the name implies. 2015's Secret Wars looks a little different, however. According to the announcement video Marvel put out a few weeks ago, the new Battleworld will be comprised of forty-some states (with a few still classified). Each made up not of characters or teams, but of characters from different timelines, universes, and story arcs from throughout Marvel history. So, old Kitty Pryde from Days Of Future Past might duel with the arrogant Iron Man of Civil War, Spider-Man from 1602 might tangle with elderly Hulk, who knows? What fans do know is what the map looks like (high-res version here). Less clear is what all those locations actually are. Luckily, there's a tour guide to go alongside the map. So strap in and try and get your head around the forty region of Battleworld that'll make up next year's Secret Wars.
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/
