Secret Wars Video (Crisis Cameo)

[TELLE]

Hope everyone here has seen the video of the Secret Wars Re-enactment Society.  It is simply amazing.

There is also a bit of Crisis crossover, to keep this post On Topic.

http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/04/the_secret_wars_reenactment_so.html

[JulianPerez]

Ha ha. This is hilarious beyond reason. For some reason, the thing I find the funniest is the fact that in all my years of reading Avengers comics, I never before realized how...well...EASY it is to make a Kang costume. It's a mask (but not even a very complicated mask, either) and a comfortable suit, and that's it.

There was a story that my comic book store owner told me: at the time the original CRISIS came out, nobody cared about it at all, because what everybody was talking about was Marvel's SECRET WARS. This was because at the time, Marvel was the Top Dog comics company in a way impossible to even compare to today where the two companies are more or less neck and neck, and further, because CRISIS was a very...well, it was a "Silver Age" story that required a lot of knowledge of DC history to make sense, and that was at a time when even DC fans wanted something else. Hell, the biggest DC titles at the time were NEW TEEN TITANS and LEGION OF SUPERHEROES, both of which were the least "DC" style books. CRISIS had Angle Man, Detective Chimp, a JLA/JSA team-up, Gorilla City, and so forth.

The absolutely gorgeous Perez art notwithstanding, SECRET WARS has aged much better than CRISIS has. Not just because SECRET WARS had Jimmy Shooter writing it. But mostly because CRISIS was written to "accomplish" something, whereas SECRET WARS had no ultimate endgoal except to just be an entertaining story.

Also, as weird as it sounds, CRISIS felt a lot like Daniel Clowes' ICE HAVEN, in the sense that ICE HAVEN was a series of newspaper strips that tell a complete story. CRISIS wasn't a series of newspaper strips, but it jumped POV so much that it sure did feel that way; it felt like a comic book with A.D.D. Didn't like what was going on in CRISIS? Just wait five panels. Whereas SECRET WARS kept an even perspective and didn't jump around as much, often to the detriment of the story: the most interesting stories in SECRET WARS was what was going on with the X-Men and the Wasp befriending the Lizard.

Further, SECRET WARS felt much more like a Marvel Universe story than CRISIS felt like a "DC" story. SECRET WARS featured all the classic Marvel bad guys, given a reason to duke it out with the heroes. Sure, SECRET WARS had the Beyonder, a guy not before seen, but the Beyonder was not on the scene; the conflict was created by things like Galactus trying to "eat" the Battleworld, the Enchantress trying to seduce Doctor Doom, and Magneto teaming up with the X-Men.

(Incidentally, this is why SECRET WARS II like so many sequels, was not as great as the first; the Beyonder was by far the LEAST interesting thing about the first SECRET WARS, and making him the focus was a mistake.)

Whereas CRISIS's man villain was the Anti-Monitor and an antimatter wave - neither of which are exactly defining elements of the DCU. Sure, they have the Thunderers, but they're there almost as an afterthought, as in Marv thought "...Oh yeah, the bad guy is kind of from Qward, isn't he?"

I'm not throwing out my "John Byrne Should Have Died In CRISIS" T-shirt away anytime soon, though.  

[TELLE]

Julian, take it from this battle-scarred veteran, your dealer is correct.  As an impressionable youngster, not wholly weaned off of Marvel/super-heroes-in-general, I picked up most of Secret Wars and thought it was the bees knees for awhile (except for the art) until I overheard two much older dealer-types discussing Crisis and how much better it was.  So I jumped ship.  Surprisingly, I was a Wolfman/Perez/Titans fan at the time so my ignorance of Crisis seems inexplicable.  After I started buying the series, I went around picking up the previous Crisis issues of JLA, in true fan-boy style.

God bless you for the best use of a Dan Clowes reference I have ever read anywhere!

[Super Monkey]

picked up most of Secret Wars and thought it was the bees knees for awhile (except for the art)

Mike Zeck's line art is good but not that impressive to me, kind of ho-hum if you ask me. His paintings however are brilliant. So he can paint better than he can draw.

I remember as a little kid I would see those amazing Punisher covers, go oh my gosh, pick up the comic look at the artwork inside, go oh man.. and put it right back

Well, it wasn't like my mom would ever pay for a Punisher comic anyway...

My mom always wanted to know exactly what she was paying for, unlike most parents today who just give their kids money to get them off their back and they bring home ultra violent video games, x-rated comics and slutty clothes.

And some how laws must be passed to protect the children...

from their lazy parents I guess...

but enough ranting for now

[TELLE]

Super-Monkey, we must have been hit with some Red K, because we are old!!

I had no idea it was Mike Zeck, who became sought after for his cover art.
The women in Secret Wars had big hips, which I would find interesting now but was perplexed/disgusted by then.

Who'd win, Secret Wars or Contest of Champions?

[Super Monkey]

Contest of Champions was the 1st ever big cross company crossover, way back in 1982.

I never read it, I only read about it, it seem to be nothing more than one big fight, which was the norm for Marvel comics, they even did a second part in 1999, which was written by Chris Claremont of all people. I didn't read it either

I only have the 1st issue of Secret Wars, and that's it.

I did read SW2 and it was awful.

My big Brother told me as a kid that those 80's comics were all recycled junk, and it was all done before with the The Korvac saga.

Never read that one too  

[JulianPerez]

Well, it wasn't like my mom would ever pay for a Punisher comic anyway...

My mom always wanted to know exactly what she was paying for, unlike most parents today who just give their kids money to get them off their back and they bring home ultra violent video games, x-rated comics and slutty clothes.

And some how laws must be passed to protect the children...

from their lazy parents I guess...

but enough ranting for now

It's funny: the thing I always liked best about MAD magazine was the fact that I had this definite sense I wasn't supposed to be reading it. I was too young to get the dirty jokes, but old enough to get a sense that this was subversive (and therefore cool to read and desireable).

Remember that speech by that toadie in SYRIANA where he explains that the reason we have laws against corruption is specifically so we can allow it to happen?

That's the secret of MAD's success: the fact that NOBODY'S Mom lets them read it. If Moms everywhere started buying MAD Magazine for their kids, MAD would be in trouble.

Super-Monkey, we must have been hit with some Red K, because we are old!!

I had no idea it was Mike Zeck, who became sought after for his cover art.
The women in Secret Wars had big hips, which I would find interesting now but was perplexed/disgusted by then.

Who'd win, Secret Wars or Contest of Champions?

Oh...SECRET WARS by an order of magnitude.

CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS had a good concept but ridiculous execution: have the Marvel heroes face off against international heroes.

Now, if those international heroes weren't goofy stereotypes, we'd be somewhere. The hero from Ireland is Shamrock, whose power is (wait for it) Super-Luck. And then we had Arabian Knight, whose powers included having a magic sword, a flying carpet, and not liking Jews.

Essentially, it was "It's a Small World" only with proton beams. I'm surprised there wasn't a Danish kid with killer wooden shoes.

There also were a million other dumb things: Iron Man...in his armor...doing laps? That made no sense. I do have one word of praise for it, which is that it made use of the fact that Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, could make invisible things visible - a power that she literally has not used in decades.

The one bright spot to CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS is that an even better story was able to be told using elements from it by Steve Englehart, in his AVENGERS WEST COAST run, where Steve played off the events of CONTEST to use the Grandmaster and the Collector, in order to tell a story that had the West Coast Avengers battle the East Coast Avengers. I didn't think it was possible to tell a better story than Englehart's "Avengers/Defenders War," but here Stainless proved me wrong: the battles were intense, the solution was intriguing, and it was one of those situations where the odds were so against the good guys, even a cynical reader like me had the illusion that victory may be in doubt.

The CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS TPB is totally worth picking up. If not for CONTEST itself, but the fact that it came reprinted with Englehart's West Coast/East Coast war.

[nightwing]

TELLE writes:

Super-Monkey, we must have been hit with some Red K, because we are old!!

You think *you're* old, I was in college when "Crisis" and "Secret Wars" hit the shops.  From my point of view, Crisis was the bigger event, though I agree as a story it was the worst kind of train wreck.  

Julian et al are probably right that many fans of the day were more excited about "Secret Wars," but a lot depends on which fans you talked to.  Where I was living, it broke down -- like everything else -- along the usual lines.  Marvel fans were excited about "Secret Wars" and viewed "Crisis" as a huge, complicated story about characters and concepts they didn't know or care about anyway, whereas "Secret Wars" was what they understood and loved...lots and lots of fight scenes.

DC fans, on the other hand, viewed "Secret Wars" as Marvel's hastily slapped-together effort to steal DC's thunder with a "major event" of their own, only with a then relatively unknown artist (compared to superstar Perez) and with nowhere near the promise of sweeping change and cosmic import that "Crisis" had.  It had the stink of "cheapo quickie" about it, and at best seemed to be the typical Marvel stuff, only on steroids.  A couple hundred pages of mindless slugfests instead of just 30.

Julian Perez writes:

Further, SECRET WARS felt much more like a Marvel Universe story than CRISIS felt like a "DC" story.

And this was the problem with SW, for me.  Growing up, I always saw Marvel comics as extended fight scenes with a little soap opera thrown in to stitch them all together.  I didn't see what was so special about a mini-series devoted to everybody fighting everybody else.  The same thing happened in every other Marvel book, only on a smaller scale, every month out of every year.

On the other hand, there was at least the germ of a good idea there.  If I recall, every hero and villain was snatched off the Earth and plopped down on this planet to fight each other.  Whether they stayed there for the run of the series or popped back and forth to Earth at the Beyonder's whim I don't remember, but I think the idea of a Marvel Earth with no super-powered beings is fascinating.  Consider: there's almost never any natural disasters on Marvel Earth and after the 60s or so not many many memorable crimes committed by rank-and-file crooks.  All of Marvel Earth's troubles are caused by superheroes fighting supervillains, superheroes fighting superheroes and supervillains fighting supervillains.  If suddenly they were all to disappear -- all of them -- I think the people of Marvel Earth would be delighted and relieved.  It would have been interesting if at the end of Secret Wars they all came back and the people of the Earth let out a collective "Noooooooooooo!"

Anyway, if we're going to compare mini-series, I think the closest counterpart to "Secret Wars" was DC's "Super-Powers" miniseries.  Both were ultimately of little import to history and both felt like advertisements for a toy line.