Hickman’s multi-year epic and altering the Marvel Universe

Jonathan Hickman has been writing a multi-year comic book epic at Marvel comics. The Avengers and New Avengers has been great plot and character driven stories.

It is culminating in a new Secret Wars series. There are spoilers related to what has been written and there is a collection of the information that is online about what is expected to happen.

“Secret Wars” set to fundamentally alter the Marvel and Ultimate Universes.

Secret Wars is the finale to his three-year Avengers epic

Avengers is not really a happy story. The Avengers books, we kind of billed it as a mystery—what’s behind all of this stuff, what’s causing all of the incursions? Which is a total lie, because it’s not a mystery, it’s a horror story.

The premise of Avengers is that it’s a book about light and life, and New Avengers was always about darkness and death, and they contrast each other. What nobody saw coming was that the New Avengers book would completely eclipse the Avengers book at the end of the second act and rocket us into the stuff that’s going on now.

We get to a point where all of the arguments that we’ve kind of been talking about in both books — what do heroes do when they can’t win? — that’s kind of the story that I wanted to do. Some of them stop acting like heroes and some become villains, some go quietly and some do not. Some rediscover who they are.

A lot of the interesting chatter about the book has been kind of this weird pragmatism where people think that the New Avengers characters, the Illuminati characters, are the heroes, and that the Avengers characters are being overly idyllic and nobody understands that everything is a life and death scenario.

How does the wreckage of the multiverse in Secret Wars factor into these themes you’ve been exploring in Avengers?

It’s the logical conclusion of them. It’s the resolution, it’s the final act. Think of Secret Wars like this: it is absolutely a self-contained story in that you can pick up issue one and read through issue eight, and you don’t have to have read all the Avengers stuff that’s been going on for the last couple years. You really don’t. Even though it’s the final act, it’s structured in such a way that everything is there.

Big Spoiler

Battleworld will be the Marvel Universe during the Secret Wars and will be building blocks of what will be the Marvel Universe after.

It appears it will be merged reality world-universe where all of Marvels greatest hits stories stay present.

A Facebook page on Marvel Secret Wars 2015 Theories.

Hickman New Avengers series at Marvel.com

Hickman Avengers series at Marvel.com

Hickman also wrote a great run on Fantastic Four

SOURCES – Comics Alliance, Youtube, Marvel, EW.com