The much anticipated reboot or retcon, whatever you would like to call it, isn’t a story that an average reader could just dive into and enjoy.
Secret Wars #1 has cover art that will make you drool, but the comic itself is mindless under drawn and the story feels as if you’re reading an issue that doesn’t have any plot to speak of. Other than the fact that 1610
Reed Richards tricks the only surviving members of his universe to try and collide theirs with the 616 for an unknown reason.
The action blows by so fast you barley even get a glimpse of any of your favorite heroes but they did make their point to include
Guardians of the Galaxy, which felt like they held no purpose being on Earth. It feels like a tack on to include these characters who should be half way across the Galaxy doing other things starting more problems and instead their on Earth fighting against an alternate universe for a reason that isn’t explained in this particular issue.
Much of the arc plays out like every other one you didn’t enjoy from the
Ultimates with pointless deaths and overelaborate images of destruction. Which brings me to artist Esad Ribic, although he did great work on
The Fantastic Four, this series however, contains bleak and dreary designs that are filled with what looks like unfinished parts.
The writing of this comic was so all over the place as they just assumed that you knew every one of these characters without an introduction. Or that you could easily tell the 616 from their 1610 counterparts, which was not the case. Handing
Jonathan Hickman the keys to the kingdom and letting him write such a terrible story and call it Secret Wars is a shame. Fans will go into this wanting something special and they’ll only get what feels like a cheap shot at
FOX for creating
Fantastic Four.
Now before anyone gets offended by this review, this review is judged based on it being an Issue 1 release and no one wants to read a comic book and be lost right from the beginning. I also wasn’t interested in going back and reading 5 years of
Hickman's work that isn’t what the first issue of a series should do. But also taking a stab at
FOX just for the sake of it isn’t right on any level but what I also find the lack of use for the
Ultimate Spider-man to be a little bit of a letdown I believe he only had a few panels.
I went into this wanting to love it as much as the original event and was hoping we would get something that would trump
Spider-Man getting his black costume but I closed that last page wondering why I wasted money on it.
Secret Wars #1 is awful and serves as another attempt to reboot and re-imagine the Marvel Universe with some of the best the
Ultimates have to offer, such as
Miles Morales (Spider-man) but it also to serves as a crisis event that you just can’t wait to be over at least with
DC’s Convergence you can jump in on Issue 1 and know what is going on without having to research centuries of comics and what
Marvel doesn’t with two worlds
DC is doing better with every generation of
DC Comics you can think of.