Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Secret Wars II

"Yo yo yo, check it out, boy-eeee! We're
representin' from the Golden Age, don't front or you will know our rage, patriotic boy toys from the Forties, chug our forties, and the ladies like to suck it cause we taste so sweet, take it Dandy!"

"Yo Yank, you know my glock goes ackackack, and all you sucka DJs betta step back back back, when we busta rap even the japs know it's like When Animals Attack!"

"I'm DJ Yank, y'all. Gimme your thanks, y'all. I take it to the bank y'all, with my homie, you call him 'Dandy.' and he say 'Hooop! Dere it is!'"

"Hoop! Dere it is!"

"Peace out, y'all."

Here it is, finally, the followup to Marvel's wildly succesful Secret Wars miniseries, brought to us by then-editor-in-chief Jim Shooter - the man famous for being able to say "The last thing this industry needs is another superhero comic" and "I'm writing a new superhero comic" in the same breath, and G&F alum (for his thick-necked brushstrokes on Kitty Pryde and Wolverine), Al Milgrom.

Props where props are due department, Shooter may never go down as one of the great writers of mainstream comics, but he'll always be at the very least one of the more dependable workhorses. Usually, you can depend on him for an entertaining story, often a very well-done story, and only occasionally a terribly awful bad nine-issue miniseries. Al, as mentioned earlier, is a heck of an editor and cleanup inker, but inexplicably was allowed to pencil this, ANOTHER high-profile Marvel miniseries which would've benefitted from a gentler touch. Young Steve Leialoha, a current fave of mine, provides halting and seemingly confused inks.

The story picks up on what no man can call an "unresolved plot thread" without breaking into riotous laughter - or bawling in horror. The Beyonder, an omnipotent being peering into our universe by means of a spontaneously generated cosmic peephole, kicks off the original Secret Wars series abducting Earth's greatest heroes and villains and having them play out the plateau of their eternal morality play for him. In this sequel, his curiosity about humanity left unsated, he ventures to Earth in a human disguise. hoping to learn about us by living among us.

Abstractly speaking, it's an interesting enough premise for a story ... a being of virtually limitless power and no moral barometer to speak of is driven to Earth by his one human characteristic - curiosity - to learn by walking among them what it is precisely that makes humanity so unique. It's a very Seventies story, very Green Lantern/Green Arrow, except that if Denny O'Neil had been writing it, it would've wrapped up in twenty-five pages, and the kicker would've been that the alien ends up finding happiness and contentment being a hobo.

Sadly, this thing is a plodding brickhouse of overdone monologues and tiring existentialism.

By contrast to Secret Wars I, where the mightiest heroes and viallins on Earth fought a cataclysmic war of mythic proportions, Shooter brings us in the sequel such riveting scenes as: A television cartoon writer gaining trememndous destructive powers and blowing up a McDonald's, the Beyonder destroying the earth, and it gets fixed immediately (that happens like FIFTEEN times or something), and the Beyonder looking at all the STUFF he has. Over and over again.

I'm not one of those guys who thinks every book needs to have a fight scene, but I do consider myself something of a fight scene snob in that I want any fight scene I DO see to at least be ... any good at all. Whereas this book did have three battles per issue, or thereabouts, they all went like this: (A) group of super heroes leaps out from behind a billboard, parked car, toaster oven, etc (B) they whup on Beyonder for about two or three panels and then (C) Beyonder basically yawns and walks away.

Boom, THREE TIMES AN ISSUE! And theoretically all the heroes of Earth had been alerted to the Beyonder's presence, and to the terrible destruction he could cause, but rather than - say - make a plan or come up with some inexplicable scientific gadget to defeat him ... you know, the stuff they do every issue of their own comics and have done since the beginning of time ... they just like to leap out from behind the bushes and try to jump on his head. It's about as effective as putting a flaming bag of poop on his doorstep, except that this way the Beyonder doesn't even get POOP ON HIS SHOES!

To illustrate this point, let me recreate a particular scene for you: The Beyonder hooks up with Boom-Boom*, a character who debuts in this series though eventually ends up with X-Force. Boom Boom separates from him at some point and rats him out to the Avengers. The Avengers gather their whole roster, Dr.Strange, and the Fantastic Four. They jump out of the bushes and stumble over each other for four panels. Then the Beyonder walks away, and they LET HIM GO despite being there to defeat him in the first place.

But wait, there's more. Noticing that the Beyonder seems a little depressed, the heroes decide to ask Boom-Boom if she knows why, only she's slipped away in the confusion. So they write her off.

That's right, using only the amazing power of her OWN TWO LEGS, she left the scene of the battle which only lasted about a minute and a half, meaning she is CLEARLY lost for good. How could the heroes possibly hunt her down knowing that she's gone a full HUNDRED YARDS or more away from her last known location!? If only someone there had some kind of super-advanced armor which could track people, or was a super-brilliant scientist who could create a vanilla-pudding sensing hemmorhoid pillow using only a tin can and a plastic spork, or was the GODDAMN MASTER OF THE MYSTIC ARTS and had an ALL-SEEING
EYE AMULET right on his goddamn lapel!

This is only one of dozens of scenes that actually had me yelling at this comic book. Not just shouting in frustration or incredulousness, but also trying to force it out of existence using only my voice, like that one groovy black Legionnaire. I used persuasion where I could. "Staples! Jesus Jumping Cats, how can you stand to hold together a book this awful? Fall apart! Now!" and "Paper, you dishonor your noble tree ancestors by holding onto this image. I demand that you reject the ink that created it, NOW!"

It didn't work.

Also weighing the book down like a pork-stuffed redwood log were the endless FLASHBACKS and RECAPS. Lord, you really didn't have to worry about missing the original Secret Wars story, because they recapped it for you ... in every issue. Okay, that's not precisely true; they stopped doing it around the fourth or fifth issue ... at which point they offered recaps of the previous issues of THIS miniseries. Hell, sometimes they went for the threepeat and would recap the first series, the previous issues of this series, AND any important events from any of the eight hundred CROSSOVER
books they did. If you buy one Marvel comic in 1985, make it Secret Wars ... because it blows the plot of every other book they produced that year.

The thing also failed to follow the "show, don't tell" rule of good comics - "failed" in the same sense as when you say something like "The pilot failed to adjust his trajectory and crashed his missile-laden jet first into the children's hospital and then smack dab into the main gasline for the town." The average panel in this book is anywhere from one-third to THREE-FOURTHS dialogue, and at one point there becomes such a critical struggle between
allowable text space and cramped art that the hand-letterer gives up and they have a typography machine add in text in a smaller typeface to several panels.

Not that every word was pure gold ... far from it. Most of it was sort of endless, over-obvious mewling about the varied state of the human condition - some of it sounding all the world like Steve Ditko grabbed the pen and wrote a few pages. Other parts would be the heroes or narrator taking a moment to describe what was happenin before their very eyes. No kidding. Lots of "Look out, he's shooting energy beams" and "those shards of glass are coming right for us!" ... stuff that the artist should've been able to represent without the writer feeling he had to mention it.

To wit: Captain America explains, as the Beyonder
vanishes in a flash of yellow light, "He disappeared!" Yes, thank
you Cap. You roided out imbecile.

I swear there's more to loathe, but to document every failing in the book would be to REPRINT this book. Suffice it to say, the heroes unveil their boots of clay as they make a resolution to actually go kill the Beyonder (say it with me ... "!!!"), and then end up changing their mind, because he turned himself into a baby. That the heroes, all of whom abide by that hoary old comic standard, the Code Against Killing (could be worth fifteen points in Champions), decided to off the super-omnipotent being but then change their minds when it's a super-omnipotent alien BABY being kinda puts
a lie to any moral standard they're supposed to represent. Mind you, if these had been TEXAN super-heroes, that baby would've been frying in an electric bassinet before we had time to blink.

There's so much more in this series, like the fact that it was the awakening maternal instinct of the female heroes who kept the good guys from killing the Beyonder baby, or how the Beyonder comes to earth and ends up looking like a white Michael Jackson (that was back in the days before "White Michael Jackson" was such a redundancy), or how ONCE AGAIN Stan Lee pops up in a guest shot in a book we review (And why is he always so evil?)

• Enjoy Byrne/Austin here ... and suffer the inside art
  

*Boom Boom makes her first appearance in Secret Wars 2 #5. I called Bob Rozakis night and day at his home number, trying to figure out how much a mint edition copy would get me. He would just say stuff like "Professor Zoom, the reverse-Flash, is Eobard Thawne" and "Man-Bat #1 is worth thirty cents in good condition" and "Leave me alone or I'll have you arrested."