shhhhhh secret wars is the big marvel summer event of 2015

Yeah, considering how important the Beyonders are to the premise of the whole story, it's weird that we see so little of them and don't really learn what was motivating them. Having Beyonder(s) show up a the end would've nicelly mirrored the originat Secret Wars, just like as the rest of story did. Maybe they could've even bring back the original Beyonder to help save the day, since he clearly wasn't one of these evil Beyonders.

And I was surprised too how much of a Fantastic Four story this was, give that the build-up to it was all in the Avengers titles. Okay, Reed played a fairly big role in New Avengers, but besides him, T'Challa was pretty much the only Avengers character who got to do important stuff. I guess Hickman felt it was symbolic, since this was supposed to be the "death of the Marvel Universe": it begins with the FF in 1962, and ends with them in 2016. (And then gets created again by them.)

Also he's been building towards this from his Fantastic Four / FF work for a while.

I remember his Fantastic Four having a super-long, complex story of its own, but like I said I never finished it... (Got as far as the first few Future Foundation issues.) Was he hinting towards the incursion stuff in that run already?

One thing that was also discussed in the Marvel thread: what exactly did T'Challa do at the end of the final issue? The way I read it, he used the Reality Gem to recreate Wakanda as it was before the incursions began. In New Avengers it was established that that Infinity Gems only work in their native universe. And Dr. Strange said Doomstadt was the only piece left of the universe where these particular Gems came from. So the Infinity Gauntlet only had power over Doomstadt, not the entire planet nor the universe. That's why T'Challa and Namor had to travel to Doomstadt after finding the Gauntlet.

So my interpretation was that T'Challa made Doomstadt into Wakanda as it was in the first issue of New Avengers, before the first incursion. Some people seem to have read it that he used the Time Gem instead to turn back time, so that the whole plot of the New Avengers run was effectively erased, and there were no incursions to begin with. I guess at that point, when the final universe collapsed, the limitations to the Gems would be gone too, which would also explain why T'Challa waited until that very moment to use the Gem. But I don't like the Time Gem explanation, because that would mean that none of the heroes involved (including T'Challa himself) would even remember what happened, making the whole thing a bit too much like Crisis on Infinite Earths. And certainly Doom on the final page seems to know what happened to him.

I never really read the plot arc of Black Panther wielding the gauntlet as anything more than "this thing can actually take on Doom"

Well that's how it was used until the final pages of the final issue, but clearly he does something with one of the Gems there, since after that we get a repeat of the first couple of pages of Hickman's first New Avengers issue, except that those Wakandan teens never die and the first incursion never happens.

In this review Hickman and Tom Breevort are asked about that scene, but they refuse go into detail, they just say T'Challa used either the Reality Gem or the Time Gem.

Let's back up a bit and talk about what exactly the Black Panther did near the end of the story. Was that the Time Gem he used there near the end?

Hickman: Maybe...

Brevoort: [Laughs]

Hickman: Did we ever agree on that, Tom? Did we ever come down on whether it was the Time Gem or the Reality Gem?

Brevoort: Boy, we went back and forth on that right up until the end. I think it was the Time Gem, but it's been a while now, and it was so last minute. You and I were chatting at 7:30 that night as the book was getting done going, "What color is the gem? It's this color now, but it has to be that color! What color does it have to be? Because it's got to work this way or that way."

I remember, we went back and forth between it being the Time Gem or the Reality Gem.

Hickman: It was colored wrong. It was colored green. And you called me up, and -- I won't say you were freaking out, but you were not happy. [Laughs]

Brevoort: [Laughs] It was late on a Friday! I wanted to be done with this!

Hickman: I actually went in and tweaked the color and changed it. Then we had a debate about whether or not it should the Time or the Reality Gem, because both of them work in terms of where we were going with the story and what it actually means.

The point of it, though, was to get T'Challa back to where he was in "New Avengers" #1, so he could act as an advocate for doing things a better way. To carry the weight of it.

there's the answer: it's whatever gem made him reappear at the beginning of the plot arc

My reading was that everyone dies except for Multiple Man, T'Challa, and Reed (or thereabouts) and that everyone in the new multiverse has been recreated by Franklin.

So basically everyone alive now is a Franklin zombie, which is sort of existentially creepy, but hey, you know, comics.

I had Chuck's take on it

Yeah, I agree it's creepy. Though I guess you could argue that all those Molecule Men stored the information of their respective universe inside them, and when they died, that information collapsed into the one final Molecule Man left, and the multiverse was then reproduced based on that information... Because otherwise we'd have to think things were recreated based on what Frankling remembers of them, and if he has less than perfect memory, that might lead to... some interesting results.

But it's still better than Superman wishing the universe back via magical wishing machine, or whatever it was that happened at the end of Final Crisis. (Hickman really is the Marvel Morrison, isn't he?)

Though if it was the Time Gem T'Challa used, and he turned back time to before the first incursion, that would mean that the 616 universe is still exacly as it was before, and it's only the other universes that are populated by Franklin zombies.

Crisis has a similarly confusing ending: Psycho Pirate is locked in a padded cell and he's all "I'm the ONLY ONE who REMEMBERS!!!". But the rest of the book doesn't mention anything about anyone else forgetting anything, it's just implied in a kind of weird, squirrelly way.

(I love that ending, though - it haunted me as a kid, and it's one of the rare examples where a completely nonsensical ending works much better than tidying up the lose ends.)

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Sue mentions the incursion though, so presumably that means he doesn't turn back time?

Maybe it's not supposed to make sense. On the positive side: This is the kind of thing Al E lives for resolving.

Yeah, I loved that ending too, and Morrison's later use of it in Animal Man was brilliant as well.

Though IIRC the original idea was that all the heroes who battled the Anti-Monitor at the beginning of time were supposed remember what happened, not just Psycho Pirate. But they retconned that idea soon after CoIE, I guess because it would be pretty weird to write Superman or Batman stories where they know the world they're living in now is not their original one.

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iirc Franklin is just designing them, the Beyonder power is actually creating them

Sue mentions the incursion though, so presumably that means he doesn't turn back time?

I think in that final scene the FF are supposed to be outside the multiverse. So whatever T'Challa did to the 616 universe, it wouldn't affect them. Though no one else should remember the incursions, if he used the Time Gem. And it wouldn't explain how Miles Morales is now living happily on the 616 universe without being all "wtf happened?!".

So yeah, it's pretty much in the same category as the Final Crisis ending, "don't think about it too much, just accept it".

But the Richardses are in some sort of extrauniversal space that the time travel/reset didn't (imo) apply to. After a few minutes of pondering it all I just decide that Hickman is yanking my chain and I go on to other topics. What is interesting is that a few combined-universe characters know about the multiverse collapse, Battleworld, etc. Miles Morales...T'challa...Dr. Doom...who else?

xposts

Apparently the Ultimate Reed Richards survived this even though it looked like Molecule Man turned him into pizza slices? I read somewhere that he's appeared in some of the All-New Marvel comics. So presumably he would know that he's not living in his own universe anymore?

Don't think about it too much

Picturing Tuomas leaning on his stack of no-prizes, pondering

I can't help it!

One also has to wonder, if Franklin/Molecule Man had the power to create the multiverse again, why didn't they also recreate the Ultimate universe, instead of putting the surviving Ultimate characters in the 616 universe?

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I'm sure they'll get around to it when it's rebootin' time again.

I hope the reboot takes place soon. I'm hoping for a third number one issue of A-Force and Weirdworld before twelve months have elapsed.

One of the plotlines of New Avengers is Ultimate Reed trying to work out why the world is suddenly different. And then over in the Ultimates, they're following up Bendis's "time is broken" thing that got forgotten about. Al is basically in crossover plot-patch-up mode. (He's good at it though.)

self-confident chill Victor Von Doom can only last so long

tried reading secret wars for the third time last night, simply uninterested. it's kinda garbage.

I was going to "ok, shakey" you, but you did try

multiple times! hickman's penchant for multiple blank pages bookended by reams of unrevealing dialogue did me in.

he's guilty of having dialogue or plot beats that only resonant two issues later

*resonate

Or two years later, as the case may be.

By Hickman's usual standards, SW is about as accessible as it gets.

I read Secret Wars but found it quite hard to follow. The most notable thing about it for me was that the characters kept doing this facial expression.

i liked his FF run just fine! Don't see why he got given the keys to the kingdom based on that though. Woulda much preferred, say, Remender's vision of a revamped Marvel world. Hickman's is so convoluted and presumes you know SO MUCH about continuity... which I do! It's still too much of a slog to have a go at. Plus it fucked up any number of perfectly good series by spiking them with universe killing continuity. Ant Man / Howard the Duck were just about at a solidclip and then this nonsense forces them to restart.

The writers would have known years in advance.

I thought his F4 was solid but at least the first half of Hickman's Avengers run seemed like an amalgam of already existing stories. Its pretty much a darker The Authority/Crisis story told with the Marvel characters. It would have been better to have used the actual existing Marvel cosmic cosmology instead of adding this whole other layer.

I agree that the Builders were an unnecessary addition, when Hickman could've used Celestials or something, but the rest of the story did use existing cosmology. Even the existence of multiple Beyonders was apparently established in some older story, though I've never read it. The only problem I had with it was that their increased power level and motivation for destroying the multiverse was never properly explained... Though I guess that was part of the concept: these are vast cosmic beings whose minds operate on a whole other level, so their motivations would be inexplicable to us.

Also, while I get it that the story Hickman wanted to tell eventually had to deal with the Living Tribunal in some way, I didn't like the idea that Beyonders fight it and beat it. IMO the whole idea of the Living Tribunal is cool in that he has the highest judgment in the entire Marvel universe, and everyone and everything else should acquiesce to that. If he's just a big cosmic guy you can fight, that kinda ruins the concept.

I think a better way of dealing with the question "what would Living Tribunal do?" would've been that he simply doesn't interfere. Since he represents the Marvel universe God, and the Marvel universe God are the people who write these comics, the Living Tribunal would know that the multiverse won't be destroyed permanently, so he doesn't have to do anything with the Beyonders. Or would that have been to meta?

Beyonders as the cosmic versions of The Punisher... who kill the Marvel universe

so what was good in the tie ins

Thors

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I can barely remember any of them... A-Force and Thors were decent IIRC.

yep, A-Force and Thors. None of the others were/are necessary.

(And, strictly speaking, only Thors contained a plot element that had a material impact on the main story line so that's the only one I'd call "necessary". I did enjoy the team configuration of A-Force though and hope it leads to Nico becoming more prominent in the mainstream Marvel universe.)

Siege and Angela were both good.

E for Extinction was a fun take on Morrison's x-men

I read one issue of E for Extinction and wasn't really interested *shrug*