Previously on "Secret Wars": Dr. Doom teamed up with Dr. Strange and not-Dr. the Molecule Man to kill the Beyonders and make his own world where the WWE is real and where Power Rangers Megaforce was a satisfying show. However, Reed Richards likes the WWE to be fake and has set out with the Maker to stop Doom while Black Panther raised an undead army of "Power Rangers" fans to stop Doom so they can hate on "Megaforce" all they want, bringing us to the big conclusion!
And here we are friends. After a month of looking at three comics at a time, I can finally just look at one (over-sized) comic again. It is strange but given how much stuff is crammed into this book, particularly toward the end, it doesn't feel all that different. Plus it's still Secret Wars so it's not like there's a whole lot to really enjoy that much.
Right? Maybe? Who knows.
Keeping in mind that this book was meant to be an epilogue for the series, I can totally see how they would want that to work. Given where the Fantastic Four wind up by the end, it's entirely possible that this entire issue was going to be a reflective look back from their perspective. But, as things turned out, this never happened and we'll never know what an epilogue to Secret Wars would have looked like. All we have is a final battle with robots (not kidding) and a rushed conclusion.
Despite the fact that I'm looking at just one comic this week, I still don't feel the need to analyze the cover. Not that it would be going against me not looking at the others in the series, it's just that I've already explained what they all look like and this one is in keeping with that logic. There's nothing special about it. However, I will note that Doom is wearing his traditional outfit rather than the silvery God Doom one, which is a nice touch here.
We open on the battlefield where Namor and Black Panther have arrived with the Marvel Zombies to fight Doom, with Black Panther still wielding the Infinity Gauntlet.
Doom prattles on about how gods have so many more worries than kings, which was something brought up in the second issue and is something we have seen little evidence toward. Doom hasn't necessarily ruled as a god...in fact, he's been ruling like a king for much of this series. It's his law and while he has been worshiped by others, the way that he's been talking and acting with Susan and Val are more in keeping with a king trying to maintain his lands. Why would a god attend a funeral service like we saw in Issue 5? Doom may have a "god" status but he's been far more of a king than a god and it's getting quite tiresome. Black Panther is also in god-mode right now but he's still calling himself "King of the Dead."
Also: Doom mentions bringing back Atlantis and Wakanda, but as Stephen Strange mentioned back in Issues 3 and 4, Wakanda was one of the only parts of Earth-616 that survived the Final Incursion. Way to stay within continuity, guys.
Black Panther temporarily subdues Doom before their fight begins in the sky and land, over all of the other fighting going on. Naturally it seems to be just a regular brawl, but as Doom points out, he hates fighting with fisticuffs. Again: continuity is for squares, ain't it?
Meanwhile, Reed and Sue meet up, where Sue mentions that she's seen Reed before! :O
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| Oh great, now she's gonna start singing Skid Row songs... |
However, Susan only knows him from the hologram and that he is the leading suspect in the murdere of Stephen Strange. Val points out that she's a nut-job being drawn funny (okay...I'm the one pointing that out, whatever), and Reed tells her that it was all Victor who did it, calling him by name for emphasis or something. I don't know, just making it personal I guess.
Oh, and then we see this:
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| ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH! |
This is simultaneously stupid and awesome. It's stupid because Doom has all the power in any existence and Black Panther has the weapon that can eliminate all life from existence literally on his hand and because they could both rip Latverion to shreds with the flick of their wrist, and yet awesome because it's two giant robots shooting lasers at each other.
So...did I miss something? Is my "Power Rangers" joke from earlier actually relevant?
Reed keeps needlessly talking grand for no reason a bit more while Dr. Doom and Black Panther fight, including this awesome image:
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| When did we start watching Hellsing Ultimate? |
But Reed is still unable to convince Susan that he's telling the truth. The Maker rubs it in his face until they finally meet Owen Reece, who asks them for more food. See this is why Miles Morales is cool. Out of all the characters in Secret Wars, HE was the one that gave Owen some food. He deserves the title of Spider-Man for that!
The Maker suddenly turns on Reed since he showed "weakness" or something by showing compassion for Susan--because, you know, loving someone is totally a weakness...???--and starts to force him to devolve back into a monkey and threatens that he'll just let this world settle as it is until Owen Reece does this:
Looks like Owen's a...pizza Maker.
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| Yeah that just happened... |
Okay so yeah for those of you still around and who haven't smashed your screen in, I will sway your doubts: Yes, the Maker was absolutely pointless to this story. This makes the total usefulness of the Cabal adding up to be a grand total of:
ZERO.
Congratulations! You get to be never mentioned or thought of ever again!
As I mentioned earlier, Doom and Black Panther just start punching each other--as you do when you have all the power in existence--before Doom realizes that this was just a distraction and heads over to the power chamber. Susan and Val confront him but Doom just can't face them and instead calls out Reed for meddling.
The two begin to banter until Doom finally decides to kill Reed but finds that his powers aren't working, since Owen Reece has leveled the playing field to watch this all go down. The two then get into a classic Reed vs. Doom brawl of stretchy-ness versus energy blasts and here's where I'm a little torn on this issue.
On the one hand, this is just a basic, personal throw-down where the stakes are not only the fate of the multiverse, but also the fate of the Richards family. Reed is taking all of this very personally while Victor thinks that he knows he did the right thing by saving them and keeping them close rather than letting them fall into the void after the Incursions. A pretty sweet representation of their struggle is actually in the checkerboard splash page in the middle of the fight:
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| Wait so where do I put the pieces? |
While this is an absolutely great page to look at from Esad Ribic, if a little jarring at first, it's also Hickman showing us the very blatant metaphor that they are the pieces to each other's puzzle, and that they're basically the same man but who go about their ambitions differently. Doom does it for pride, while Reed does it to help his family and those around him. Both would have, given this power, made new worlds, but Reed does it for different, better reasons.
I just don't know if a basic brawl is worthy of this. I mean, yeah it's cool that Black Panther has the Infinity Gauntlet, but what if it'd been Reed to be the one that got it? Think back to Issue 6. Black Panther was the one that was hyped to fight Doom, but shouldn't it have always been Reed as the final hyped battle? It's what makes Black Panther's fight seem sort of meaningless. The Infinity Gauntlet was just used as a distraction...for a regular fist-fight. This fight should be so much more! This is the culmination of their war! This is, for the foreseeable future, their final battle. While the emotional stakes are sort of there, they aren't conveyed well enough through the battle itself. It's basically just the two of them grappling while they speak fancy to each other (which also detracts from the battle a little bit).
A pretty sweet moment does occur, though, when the two are at a stalemate and Doom asks Reed if he would have done a better job of using the power of the Beyonders. The response?
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| Reed's gonna have a pretty bad tan when this is over... |
Boom! There's a solid, memorable moment. Thank you, Secret Wars.
Anyway, Molecule Man overhears this and decides that was just what he needed to hear and decides to destroy Latverion, engulfing everything in a bright white light.
Black Panther, I think through the power of one of the Soul Gems, manages to retain his memory and returns to Wakanda of Earth-616, where he sees some of his makers working on cartography of an unknown solar system, pointing out that they have a bright future ahead of them, and possibly alluding to Alpha Flight.
Eight months later, Owen Reece speaks with Miles Morales (who is now permanently in the main Marvel Universe) and tells him that he owes him one, which will probably either never pay off or pay off so far down the line that we'll have to be reminded of this series again. However, that's not the really cool part of this scene. No, instead it comes when Peter Parker asks him to beat up bad guys, and refers directly to Miles as Spider-Man.
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| So, does he need to get his own theme song too or...? |
I'd be foolish not to say that this isn't one of the best parts of the entire series, and this is so far one of the best things to come of Secret Wars.
Anyway, things come to a head as we see the Future Foundation and Richards family out beyond the reaches of space and time, where Valeria reveals that Reed and Franklin are using the power of the Beyonders to create entire universes off of ideas and the power that Owen Reece is still emitting. Owen is still with them and a little slice of him goes off with each new universe cast into existence. The job of the Future kids is to document all of these changes and universes.
Franklin asks his father if they're ever going to be super-heroes again, and in a rather touching scene Reed tells them that they don't need to be so long as they are doing good things for the universe. The Fantastic Four as we know it are gone, and now, Reed just wants to be dad.
Thus, the book, and Secret Wars as a whole, ends with Reed saying that he used to believe in the end of all things, in a universal contradiction, but that this final struggle for his family has taught him to endure, and that everything lives...as we see an ominous shot of a fully-healed Victor von Doom standing in his fortress, laughing gleefully.
And there you have it, folks. Secret Wars #9. I think the best way to describe this one book is the same I can describe the series:
There are crazy-awesome parts of this book. The checkerboard metaphor of Reed and Doom and then Doom's final admittance of Reed being better are great ideas that were sort of hinted at back in Issue 4. The Spider-Men getting together and then Black Panther realizing that he and Wakanda will make great advancements are all cool, and his fight with Doom (besides the robots) is visually interesting. The rest, though, just sort of exists.
There are few bad parts of this book alone compared to the series as a whole, and Ribic's art only slips up on or two times with Susan and Val's face. However, I will forgive it for the awesome checkerboard page. Sometimes the dialogue will get a little over-the-top and sometimes the book slows down. Maker's involvement was completely unnecessary, and I think this is where we get to why Secret Wars is really just an "okay" book rather than a great one.
There are too many unnecessary elements. What did the Cabal really provide for the story that the main Life Raft couldn't have? Why was there so much emphasis on the Thors? All that pandering about and fighting in the previous two issues was just sort of there, nothing felt all that special.
In the end, Secret Wars served less as a change in the status-quo and more of an opportunity to just jump ahead in time eight months with some new elements. Characters were different because of this and we just sort of went with it. It was hardly limited to its own events toward the end and it lost most of its impact thanks to pointless subplots and fights, though was able to scrounge up a decent conflict at the end between Reed and Doom as well as wrap the story, for now, of the Fantastic Four. Check it out if you want to, but I would wait until the trades or issues go down in price.
Next time, though, we enter a new era. A period of...rebirth, if you will. There are many changes happening in Gotham City and the Bat-Family is growing, thus forcing Batman and Batwoman to head a new team in Detective Comics #934, the first of many "DC Rebirth" books to be looked at this summer.
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*gifs found via Google Images*
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