Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 6, 2024 | 5 comments

Marvel hook-ups and DC mash-ups…

Fred Van Lente’s COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH is back and better than ever! Now, as a monthly feature for 2024!

See, Marvel this year is celebrating the 40th anniversary of 1984’s 12-issue Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars by re-releasing each installment as a Facsimile Edition every month. And of course, what is the DC event it’s always compared to? Why, 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, of course. And that series is also being re-released monthly too. (It started in April.)

It’s a great time to revisit two maxiseries that redefined comics for good and for bad. You can click here to find the previous entries, but right now the tally stands at 2-2. (The Secret Wars #5 Facsimile Edition is out this week.)

Ring the bell, Fred!

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By FRED VAN LENTE

Secret Wars #5: “The Battle of the Four Armies!”

Oh, silly Beyonder. What were you thinking? You bring Galactus against his will to a planet, he is going to try and eat that planet. I mean, would you tie Popeye up inside a spinach cannery?

(OK, I bet one of Popeye’s enemies did, in fact, tie him up inside a spinach cannery at least once, but then Bluto never struck me as a mental giant.)

Raymond Chandler once said the storyteller’s challenge is to make the events of stories seem both inevitable and surprising. Galactus not screwing around with Beyonder’s “kill your enemies and I will give you a vague but invaluable prize” and just summoning his solar system-sized space station to destroy Battleworld is simultaneously logical and unpredictable.

Everybody freaking out about Galactus’ Alexander the Great-level solution to the series’ Gordian Knot gives room for various romantic subplots to flourish. In the bad guys’ camp, the first Jewish-coded supervillain couple I’m aware of, Woody-Allen-but-a-god Molecule Man and zaftik Volcana, go full Revenge of the Nerds on Wrecking Crew bullies.

In the heroes’ camp, resident man-whore Johnny Storm has a groovy space-hookah session with alien hippie squeeze Zsaji (“Zah-Shee,” per Johnny) which, instead of giving you the munchies, gives you “Previously On” plot flashbacks. Convenient for a title written by the editor-in-chief who mandated every Marvel book carry such recaps.

Over in Krakoa East (aka Magneto’s Base), Colossus pines away for Kitty Pryde, who got left behind on Earth to be the MacGuffin in a multi-part New Mutants storyline.

I have a serious question: Am I supposed to care whether or not Kitty Pryde and Colossus get together? Have they ever gotten together, in regular continuity? And I say that as a person who wrote an alternate universe story in which they got married and had a kid. I feel like this is one of innumerable X-Men storylines that go into Limbo (along with, you know, the ones where they actually go into Limbo).

But because this isn’t Marvel Super Heroes Secret Romances, the titular Four Armies converge when Galactus sics a robot Army of One (OMAC?) on the heroes for interrupting dinnertime, which invites an opportunistic attack by the villains. This in turn causes the X-Men to swoop in to save the day. Because neither Spider-Man nor the Wasp are on the villains’ side, Xaviers’ Kids are victorious. Then they… run away, for some reason?

In perhaps the most out-of-character moment in a series full of them, Professor Xavier abandons a badly injured Colossus to the mercies of the homo sapiens heroes. When the other X-Men rightly call him out on it, his lame excuse is that their effectiveness as a fighting force is dependent on speed, so they don’t have time to waste on trivia like making sure no mutant is left behind.

Professor X is like, Captain America seems like a good egg. I bet he’ll make sure Colossus gets medical attention, probably. Maybe.

I mean, when has Captain America ever been prejudiced against Russians?!

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Crisis on Infinite Earths #5: “Worlds in Limbo”

“Fan Service” is a geek-circle term that gets bandied around far too often (like “Mary Sue”), and it’s a little silly to apply it to Crisis on Infinite Earths, which is basically a wet, sloppy kiss to one publisher’s entire output. But if you are a card-carrying Marvel Zombie like me (I mean, to the point where I actually wrote Marvel Zombies) this series can be bit of a chore.

What “Fan Service” is getting at, as a pejorative, is that if you don’t bother to actually set up why I should give a crap about the hundreds of characters in your story, that if I don’t come into it with a pre-existing love for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, G.I. Robot, the Warlord, Adam Strange, Jonah Hex, Sugar & Spike, Sword of the Atom, Earth-Two Hawkman who’s a reincarnated Egyptian prince not alien Earth-One Hawkman, and so on, it’s hard to muster any excitement for the tale.

Lyla/Harbinger killing the Monitor last issue under the control of the Big Bad turns out to—psyche!—be exactly what the Monitor wanted her to do! A-ha! His now-released life energy creates a “Netherverse” that prevents Earth-One and Earth-Two from being destroyed; instead they merge together across time. (Whenever anyone says that in this issue I can’t help but think, “The dudes are merging!”) This leads to some fun bits like Anthro and his cave people emerging from the Batcave into stately Wayne Manor, much to the understandable consternation of Alfred.

My favorite scene in this issue is about a trio of people you’ve never heard of before, and never hear from again: In a four-panel comic strip on the top of Page 18, we meet an elderly couple, David and Phyllis Gerrold of Chicago, who are stunned when their long-dead daughter Michele suddenly appears before them. She’s their daughter from an alternate Earth: Earth-One, as it turns out, as the Gerrolds are from Earth-Two, which is, sorry, needlessly confusing.

Though couldn’t this just be the living Michele from earlier in Earth-Two’s past, since all time periods are merging along with the two worlds? Sorry, I’m a compulsive killjoy.

It’s a great, visceral moment—another one of those inevitable-but-surprising bits Chandler talks about. It’s also a Marvels-esque look at how these cosmic events affect regular people, even if it’s four panels crammed at the top of a page with a metric shit-ton of the Legion of Super Heroes.

I am happy to see a bunch of Reddit threads and such of readers trying to figure out who the heck the Gerrolds and their daughter were. Was Michele an obscure heroine from a DC Romance book of yore? That would make sense, but apparently, no, like Lady Quark and her royal line from #3, she is unique to Crisis.

I wish there was more of this! Wolfman and Perez, you don’t need me to tell you, are supremely talented creators and whenever they do their own thing instead of just running the DCU through a blender, it’s the best part of this series.

But if what you want out of a comic book is anyone who’s ever been in a DC Comic looking at the sky with their mouths open, let’s face it, Tiger: You just hit the jackpot.

Wait, sorry, my Big Two Comics Universes are merging.

ROUND FIVE WINNER: SECRET WARS

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Our Tally So Far: SECRET WARS 3, CRISIS 2

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MORE

— COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH: Secret Wars #4 vs. Crisis on Infinite Earths #4. Click here.

— The Complete COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH Index. Click here.

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13th Dimension contributor Fred Van Lente is an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling comics writer, as well as an occasional novelist, teacher, and playwright. Sign up for updates on his upcoming projects and check out the trailer for his comics-writing course at his web site, fredvanlente.com.