shhhhhh secret wars is the big marvel summer event of 2015

If you're cowed by the Infinity reading list, you'll be heartened to learn that they'll be cranking out that much Secret Wars material every month. After looking through the solicitations for August, I think we're be nearing 150 issues. And this runs through..October, I think?

That's the thing--the SW enthusiasm had me going to the Hickman set-up reading list to see if I could get into it, but gaaaaah. Having said that, if you HAVE read all that, I can see why the payoff would be a hell of a lot of fun.

mmm but infinity is a crossover in the sense of 'go read this and then this and then this thing with a plot point you need to know about drawn haphazardly from a terrible script,' right? whereas the fun of the secret wars setup seems to be that the main series is its own thing but the miniseries are basically more ridiculous what if? stories that people felt like telling

There's nothing in Infinity you need to read except for Avengers, New Avengers, and Infinity (and Mighty Avengers, not because it's important to the story, but 'cause it's great).

I do feel bad for Jason Aaron, whose (good!) bestselling Thor book is being interrupted for several months by a (probably also good, but fanwanky) miniseries. Rebooting makes sense when a writer leaves, or if the sales are slipping, but rebooting in the middle of a successful run that seems to be pulling in a lot of new readers? Seems daft.

ok I feel like I have license to skip vast swathes of infinity now, ty

Secret Invasion was one of the only big Marvel crossovers I've read where the ancillary issues were fairly crucial to one's comprehension and enjoyment. Maybe Civil War, too. But, yeah, they're generally easily dispensible.

yes definitely - so just after the big Thor reveal, with that series going really well (art is consistently fantastic), he has to force back in tons of decades old boring MAN THOR continuity for 7 or 8 months

Infinity has a little diagram of the issues in the back of each chapter and afaik it only include New Avengers, Avengers, and Infinity

I think all you need to understand the swathes of titles out there for Battleworld is, at most, the Secret Wars title, if even that. Each issue seems to have the backstory of its "world" as a short feature at the end of the #1.

Captain America/Devil Dinosaur is a great team, why would he even want Bucky back?

to feed to DD

thanks to Marvel Puzzle Quest, my default paring for Devil Dinosaur is now Nick Fury

btw it's worth noting that with the multiverse collapsed, all the Runaways/Young Avengers/etc are fair game in Battleworld titles since they're not limited to the 616 :)

man i read the 'core' infinity story this evening and it was kinda frustrating -- like, oh, there's some guardians of the galaxy for a panel, or, something happened at the jean grey school but, who knows

it also felt weirdly low stakes, considering

I think that's true. All the actual battles don't take place in the core, just the story beats.

(Sorry, I should have mentioned as a proviso that Infinity is not very good, whichever version you read.)

I kind of get the impression that it's really three events that were shoehorned together. Black Bolt setting off the inhuman activation bomb really smells like an effort to force the Inhumans as a _thing_

well, yeah

MCU hijinks

Half of the last season of Agents of SHIELD was about the Inhumans. They're clearly working overtime to get them into the public's consciousness as soon as possible.

They're all over Hickman's FF and Avengers runs, but I've still never gotten a feel for them.

It's simple. Inhumans are the new mutants, because Marvel can't monetize the mutants in movie form. So they have to make them a "thing".

i don't quite understand how they pulled off putting quicksilver + wanda in the avengers movie

I'm guessing there is some loophole that allows them to use anyone who was ever an Avenger. Heck, in the comics they just removed their mutantdom - they're now apparently experiments of the High Evolutionary.

Are they no longer magneto's kids?

At this point in the pretty horrible Uncanny Avengers story it seems like the answer is no.

from Wikipedia:

Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) is a fictional superhero appearing in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appears in X-Men #4 (March 1964) and was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He is the twin brother of the Scarlet Witch and the son of Magneto as well as the paternal half-brother of Polaris. However, he and his twin sister were later retconned, in Uncanny Avengers #4, to be the children of Django and Marya Maximoff who were kidnapped and experimented by the High Evolutionary. After a failed experimentation that gave Pietro his power, the High Evolutionary returned them to their parents and they then grew up believing that they were common mutants.[2]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yeah the wanda/pietro retcon is a strong competitor for all-time most horrible retcons

tbh I like to think that the Marvel 616 universe has been fucking itself up as of late due to the post Age of Ultron timefuck, and this incident was part of an alternate continuity that bled over

...wow @ that retcon

add to that the fact that Magneto does have at least one kid, but it's Polaris

hahaha I was wondering when someone was going to bring that up

just wait for the multiversal version where his first kid never died in a fire

hey, at least Polaris kinda made sense, they have the same powers
what's worse was the Ultimate version where it was in question whether the twins' father was Magneto or Wolverine, who had a tryst with their mother around the right time. thanks Jeph Loeb!

Mutants in the Ultimate world were a mess.

ironically since they had an (ostensibly) simpler origin. kind of? i don't know.

natural mutation vs. genetic manipulation via the Weapon X program and then somehow spreading via a "mutant trigger" thingamabob.

Give me stock 616. Even Earth X Celestial fuckery is better than the Ultimate Universe "messing with Wolverine" origin.

Yeah, the Ultimate version is "the US government made mutants"

616 Wolverine has been completely fucked continuity-wise, and oddly enough, *not* just by the Origin series (although the later issues of that definitely helped). Again, the guy who started the plot down that path was... Jeph Loeb. They at least reversed the idea that Wolverine and other lupoid characters were somehow descended from wolves instead of primates.

I really like what Jason Aaron has done with Thor, but there seriously was a plot where a group decides to get revenge on Wolverine and they hire a group of mercenaries, all of which Wolverine kills.... only to find out they were all his children.

oh yeah, and Wolverine wanted to become a horrible killing machine pre-brain wipe, and he was in fact partially responsible for the Weapon X program melding metal to his bones

wait, what was this "mutant" trigger thingamabob? i think that's where I got lost.

omg that story that sounds awful. how many pups can a Wolverine have?

stuff like that Wolverine story started the big push that moved me out of being mutant-exclusive and more towards following what the Avengers were doing (along with Sunspot and Cannonball being tapped as Avengers)

they'll always be magneto's kids to me

wait, what was this "mutant" trigger thingamabob? i think that's where I got lost.

omg that story that sounds awful. how many pups can a Wolverine have?

I think it was in Ultimate Origins? Magneto's parents were part of the program and the changed genome became airborne when Magneto freed Wolverine, thus triggering latent mutants or something? It's been a long time since I read it. It was a mess. Fury was involved too, and I think his blood helped make the Hulk and it's a clusterfuck.

Reading Ultimate Origins right now. Saying that it's the most coherent of the Ultimatum-related comics I've read thus far is damning with wafer thin praise.

I think Hickman is the person who loves Cannonball and Sunspot second-best in the world, after DJP

Now Sunspot is rich playboy AIM leader and Cannonball has a kid!

in fairness, Sunspot was always a rich playboy

they basically made him the mutant Tony Stark, which at the end of the day I'm okay with

I'm also glad they're remembering Bobby isn't a dummy, cf the most recent Avengers World and his manipulation of the deposed AIM leaders

He's the angry South American, Cannonball is the joking Southerner
-- most writers

Any more thoughts after week 3? Quality control seems to be irregularly high for a summer crossover. I'm enjoying it. Not too much gloom and gore - so far everything seems to be in a very Peter David-esque "cheerful adventure" mould. Battleworld seems like an interesting place to stop off for a few months - unlike most parallel universe stories, it doesn't feel like it's just marking time until the inevitable continuity reset.

And even though I'm not familiar with a lot of the characters, it's all quite beginner-friendly - in content, if not in marketing.

I'm racing toward the end of the Ultimate line (just about to start Death of Spider-Man) so I'll hopefully be caught up somewhat soon. Probably not, but hopefully.