Secret Wars #2 Review

I usually avoid spoilers in comic book reviews, but this completely challenging to do with the Marvel world being born anew. Small spoilers ahead. writer: Jonathan Hickman / artist: Esad Ribic / Marvel Comics Congratulations, you’ve made it to New Marvel folks! If Secret Wars #1 was the end of everything, then the beginning of everything afterwards is Secret Wars #2. And what is Hickman the best at, you ask? Why, that would be world building, so the fact that this is literally building a new world fits right into his wheelhouse. You can look at this on the surface and it looks like a crazy mashing of Marvel characters in completely foreign scenarios that we have grown accustomed to. But it’s not random. Where their counterpart in DC’s Convergence feels a little random and auto-generated in it’s main storyline, everything “New Face in a New Place” for Secret Wars feels intentional and with logical conclusions. It makes sense that Thors are the “world police” in a sense. It makes sense that Galactus stands watch over the capital. All the details, the roles that former heroes and villains have in this new Battleworld really do answer the “what if Marvel started over” question.

It also makes sense where the worst of the worst have ended up. One imagines that we’ll get more mileage the next time someone of stature is sentenced to “The Shield” when they are forced to survive hordes of the discarded that threaten this new world. One spoiler I can hold back lies in the end, which me…