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Wednesday Comics Discussion! - Secret Wars edition

The Marvel (Comics) Universe is ending! ...but first, Marvel's going to revisit its favourite time-periods and make up some new ones. Secret Wars #1 is out today, giving us our first peak at the last of the Marvel Universe as we know it, so here be the post to discuss and speculate in!

SO, if you've read Secret Wars #1, you'll have noticed that while there was Ults!Tony, there was no 616!Steve or 616!Tony in it. So the body of this post is actually going to be about the possible mini-series with Steve and Tony that we're going to have during this event. I have Thoughts on SW#1, but they're going down below in a comment.

Taking a look over the event guides, it looks like we've got a few mini-series with Steve and Tony:

1872 has gotten a lot of commentary on tumblr due to the awesomeness of the concept and Evan Shaner's concept art, and it will definitely have both Steve and Tony

Civil War will be a leap sideways and and into the past, into a world where Steve and Tony are still fighting (are we sure this isn't the main storyline?).

After we all have our hearts broken again, there's Giant-Size Little Marvels to cheer us up. Yes, its the return of A-babies vs X-babies by Skottie Young!

I'm not quite sure how Ultimate End is going to work, since Steve's supposed to be dead, but there he is on the cover with Tony. And, uh, Thor - who was also dead? Ults has generally played more for keeps than 616, but since the universe is ending, maybe they've decided to do away with that.

No names confirmed on who will be showing up in Battleworld yet, but I'd be surprised if Steve and Tony didn't both appear there, especially given the last line in the article. Whiiiiiich also makes it sound like they'll be fighting against each other, rather than teaming up, once again. Ah, well, I've the A-babies to console me.

Armor Wars is going to feature 'Baron Stark' in a futuristic city. I'm hoping it will still be a version of Tony, since there's going to a James Rhodes at his side.

Hail Hydra - there was a moment in reading the summary where I went OH MY GOD THE RETURN OF NOMAD (who is the star of this one) buuuuut it's not Nomad Steve (any excuse to link that photo), it's his adopted son Ian, who sadly has a slightly saner fashion sense. But it does sound like Nomad will be interacting with Hydra!verse Avengers and villains and getting to see how they turned out differently, so I'm hoping that Steve, at least, will make an appearance.

I think that's probably all of them... but let me know if I'm missing any, and I'll add it to the list.

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Now posted in the right place, whoops.

I totally missed that they, uh, apparently were meant to die in A44. I thought it was, yup, another fight, but they were gonna get interrupted by the invasion and it was going to be resolved in SW. That was the biggest problem I found with A44 - that it didn't work as an ending, because I thought it wasn't over. I wasn't sure there was room left for some of the philosophical discussion that I thought it was past time they addressed, but I did think there was something else left.

But... apparently it is over! And the only philosophy is nihilism. 616!Steve and 616!Tony killed each other rather than trying to save the world. They're even missing from the cast list at the start of SW1, so presumably they died right at the end of A44. The brief glimpse of Ults!Tony was nice, but I guess he's gone too, now.

Soooo... that happened.

I'm going to enjoy all the little AUs with Secret Wars, but I'm definitely looking forward now to when they reboot, because WTF.

Well, the one confirmed thing for Ultimate End is 616 and Ult Tony meeting each other. I'm really looking forward to it! All the Tony angst!

Also, I still think the Civil War solicits sound like stevetony ff summary. It might yet be fun.

I'm not sure about A44 and SW re: Steve and Tony being dead. It's just--if you kill both your main characters, at least make it clear.
If they were supposed to die, "it ended with none" would be a much better finish to "it started with to men" than this "and one always wins" shit.
So I don't really believe either of them is dead, but that might be me speaking from the beautiful land of denial.

SW#1 gave me Ult Tony hitting on Carol, if nothing else. But I seriously don't know what to think about the rest of it.

I feel like most people were taken with how depressing/hopeless this issue was, but...I glommed hard onto the promise of hope it gave us:

Secret Wars #1: "Listen to me...you can't kill an idea. It always comes back. Resurrected. Or reborn...into a different form."

Avengers #1: "It started with an idea."

Battleworld is reborn as an Avengers World, get with me on this speculation train everyone!

...More to come later, I just wanted to put this out there first!

This is giving me hope. I don't want hope. Magic, why.

(And it makes sense, okay, Tony had all the time in the world to plan, since--and it's so very important--he had always known how hopeless it was)

Edited 2015-05-07 00:06 (UTC)

It sorta makes me sad I've been so inured to stuff at the end of this arc of the plot that the only thing that made cry in A#44 and SW#1 was Rocket getting shot.

I mean this seriously disturbs me for awhile because I generally cry at the drop of the hat. So, I've been thinking about it and I think it is because Rocket is the only one I see actually killed. Everyone else is blown up, crushed or dies off page.

Which leaves why I didn't cry for Steve and Tony in A#44. Only thing I can think of it that I've grown numb to it? Or perhaps I don't really see them as Steve and Tony anymore? I'm not really sure. This is something I'm going to think on some more.

As for everything else? I've adopted a wait and see policy and if worse comes to worse I always have back catalog, MPQ and fan fic.

I like this idea though.

*blinks*
I' not entirely sure I understand where you are going with this, but I like the idea behind it.

Plus from what we can take from the time-travel shenanigans in the OS tie-in: Avengers World lasts. Over 50,000 years into the future, it's still around. Who's to say the idea of it won't last, even after the universe collapses, only to be reborn?

And on an entirely different note, Hickmanvengers has been narrated in the past tense, so we know there's someone around to tell the tale.

I will say I've been reading this run with the expectation there will be a happy ending. There's too much riding on the life/death/rebirth cycle for there not to be, and all other criticisms aside, from what I've read from him, Hickman's stories do hold together.

They were? That went over my head then.

And wow. I wasn't expecting the end so soon. But I guess events are shifting to Battleworld? (I am so bad with keeping up with news. Thank you for the event cheat sheet.) Here's to hoping we see Tony and Steve on Battleworld then. Doesn't seem inconceivable that they'd continue/resolve their fighting there. Dead or no, if the Beyonders are Godlike, I'd imagine they can bring people back. Speaking of, I wonder if this is how we get the multiversal Avengers back.

Also, seems to me we're viewing the nihilism through Reed's POV -- and can you blame the guy? I felt so bad for him. Personally, I think it's a dark night of the soul rather than Hickman closing the book. /fingers crossed

...Or with the white out event, did Reed and the life raft all die too? :( If so, the fact he saw (what I assume was) Doom at the end, coupled with the "He's been with us all along" shot at the beginning, raises some interesting implications.

Edited 2015-05-07 04:34 (UTC)

Ooooh. I want to believe. It's very poetic.

I took it as "Don't worry, in a few months we'll put everything back where we found it." (I am such a cynic.)

I shouldn't really be commenting here because I bailed on the Hickman Avengers some time ago. (I find some of the characterisation really odd in that I expect people that intelligent to be able to, you know, learn. Mind you, it is really, really hard to write characters more intelligent than you are.) The last couple of years at Marvel seem to have been pure self-indulgence on the part of some of the writers who have "I'm having fun, and I don't care about you" attitude to their readers.

However, I expect, sooner or later, to get our beloved characters back, because that is what has happened time and again over the last fifty odd years - and is why my comics reading over that period contains quite a few hiatuses and most of the stuff we all write is AU whether in the various comics verses or the MCU.

Some friends of mine in a small fandom created a com called [redacted]denial in which (and I quote) "the bad things never happened." And, y'know, it's still going strong long after the show disappeared. In fact, it's the only general com for the show that is.

I'm just going to borrow some of your optimism here, if you don't mind. Also it's a very nice idea.

Battleworld is reborn as an Avengers World, get with me on this speculation train everyone!

Oh, my god, that I could totally get behind!

I've adopted a wait and see policy and if worse comes to worse I always have back catalog, MPQ and fan fic.

As someone who has been reading superhero comics for so long of both the Big Two and has had reboot events and DC crises (which essentially this is) happen to her favorite characters, I can say that I thin that's basically the sanest way to get through these events. ;P Whatever happens now I can always go back and read the things that I loved before - and can wait for the superhero universe to right itself again in some way. Which is usually what happens sooner or later.

Well, the one confirmed thing for Ultimate End is 616 and Ult Tony meeting each other. I'm really looking forward to it! All the Tony angst!

That's something I'm totally looking forward to, too! I hope it will be amazing and live up to my expectations. :D

The last couple of years at Marvel seem to have been pure self-indulgence on the part of some of the writers who have "I'm having fun, and I don't care about you" attitude to their readers.

I'm not sure what it is whit that, but it's not just at Marvel it's been superhero comics in general and I'm asking myself if it has to do with this being a case of former comic nerds growing up and now calling the shots or something? I'm Master of the Universe now! Raw!

I expect, sooner or later, to get our beloved characters back, because that is what has happened time and again over the last fifty odd years

*nods* I expect the same to be honest.

Indeed.

I have as many loved characters in DC's superhero universes as in Marvel's, and I haven't had much to do with them since the last crisis event. As a fan of the Giffen/DeMattis 'JLI', Devin Grayson's 'Nightwing', Perez (and John's) Wonderwoman' and the whole of 'Birds of Prey' I have been deeply dismayed by what is happening on that side of the divide.

Oh, I hear you on DC and their crises mania. The New 52 killed so much about this universe that I loved and my pull list hasn't yet recovered from that. (Although there are some titles I'm really enjoying even now. As we're pulling a mini-crisis right now that might change at any time though. ^^;)

Fellow Birds of Prey and Nightwing fan here! I think I'll never get over them de-Oracle-ing Barbara. And I so wish we could go back to the Perez times of Diana. The whole changed relationships and background thing for her is so not working for me.

I don't care much for the current event - I'm soooooo tired of events, soooooo tired -, but a few of the Convergence tie-ins were like an awesome blast from the past. I'm already sad they were/will be only two issues long.

I trust Bendis with writing Tony. I'm just afraid there won't be enough of it.

I am considering borrowing some of your optimism, like Sine! But my usual outlook in these situations, which is that hope costs nothing, er... is not strictly true, so long as hope translates to an intent to buy further comic books in this event.

After pondering it a bit more, I guess I'm on the fence, now. I mean, the world will be rebooted, no matter what. It's comics, they can't not. But it's the how of the reboot that will matter in how I ultimately view this storyline. If it reboots without anything further to do with Steve or Tony, eh. If it reboots independently of Steve and Tony, into an independent world ala Nu52, or mindwipes them on reboot so that their ending to the event was killing each other while the world burned... uhh, then my reaction will remain 'wtf'.

I can enjoy reading pretty much any low in comics so long as the characters get up and deal with it afterward. ...sadly, comics is full of plenty where they don't. But since you have read other Hickman and I haven't, I guess I'm willing to wait and see. (Does it count as borrowing optimism if I've gone from strongly negative to mildly negative?)

At least there's a bunch of fun AUs coming out of this, if nothing else :P

I'm... guessing? I didn't think they were after reading A44, but with this one, I think it's about as clear as comics these days ever get (and that's a separate rant about the overabundance of ambiguity in this storyline, to the point where it is detrimental to the story). I mean, they're not on the character list. They're not on the lifeboat. The world just ended, and everyone who was on the lifeboat is now somewhere else. (Or at least that was my interpretation of the last page, that it had crashed on pizzaworld. I don't think it was destroyed...)

Re: nihilism, I wish it were just because of Reed, but I concluded nihilism based solely on Steve and Tony's arc. :( You have two friends, very close friends, and then one betrays the other. The other in turn becomes obsessed with hunting him down, so that even at the end of the world, instead of trying to find any other way, they instead go out killing each other. The first claims he has no regrets because there was never any point, and... then the world ends, apparently proving him right.

I mean, I guess the nihilism could get eliminated when the world reboots, if it does in the manner that magicasen's predicting below - if that was where it was heading all along, and Tony just didn't see it. But whether or not I chalk up the Incursion storyline as 'wtf' or not will largely depend on whether or not there's fallout that Steve and Tony deal with, or if they really are dead. If A44 was the ending of their storyline, then for me, it's 'wtf', because nihilism is not what I read comics for!

Seventy-something issues to bring them to this point - can they return in seven or less? I don't know. Other people here are putting forward the idea that they can. I guess I can wait for those seven issues to come out before passing final judgement :P

Very much behind this. Unless the handful of time travel issues were filler-type, surely there's a future that's not pizzaworld....

Woops, that's me, Coaster.

-Coaster

I, uh, still can't see them killing each other. That is to say, I refuse to believe they die like this, forgotten under a pile of rubble whilst the universe dissolved. Steve was definitely on a suicide mission hunting down Tony. Tony though.....

Also, whatever happened to the time gem after the time travel hoopla? It always seemed like they'd use the dang thing to fix everything.

-Coaster

Tony is in Bleeding Edge though. What's up with that.

-Coaster

My guess is time travel? And tbh, if that's a choice between past Tony, and how Tony is written now (considering he's superior asshole across the books, and not-sure-if-superior-but-an-asshole in Hickmanvengers), I'd take past Tony.
But who knows really, Secret Wars seem to be a mix of everything.

I, uh, still can't see them killing each other.

This is why I'm in a state of 'wtf' - er, not at you not being able to see it, but because ending with them killing each other is such a wtf conclusion.

If it is the conclusion. It's the only one I can see from the facts as they are, but if it turns out that they didn't then I'll happily change my opinion! (And then complain some more about the ambiguity in this storyline, lol. But that would still be better, because wtf.)

Edited 2015-05-08 18:32 (UTC)

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Wednesday Comics Discussion! - Secret Wars edition

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