Posted By Dan Greenfield on Sep 28, 2024 | 2 comments

GREEN CAPE EDITION: Lotsa Doom and lotsa Spectre…

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. And that series is also being re-released monthly. (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 Crisis 5, Secret Wars 4. (The Secret Wars #10 Facsimile Edition is out Wednesday, Oct. 2.)

Ring the bell, Fred!

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By FRED VAN LENTE

Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #10: “Death to the Beyonder!”

 Dr. Doom manages to absorb all the energy from Galactus and Galactus’ house into himself, giving him near-omniscence. Jim Shooter suffers from what like I call “Gene Roddenbery Syndrome,” which is a compulsion to make your characters meet and/or fight God. Shooter does this here, he did this (better) in The Avengers—more on that later—he did it with the New Universe in Star Brand, and he did it over at Valiant in the Unity crossover.

The problem with big-g-Gods, at least like the kind depicted in your Bibles and Torahs and such, is that they’re not very dramatically interesting. Stories are about characters wanting things, then going and pursuing those things, but gods want for nothing. Sure, they boss us mortals around and deliver commandments and smitings, but that’s for the faithful to go do something about. In video game terms, gods make for great quest-givers, but terrible player characters.

Secret Wars #10 proves this point by giving us some very cool Mike Zeck panels of God-Doom looking into his own brain, and turning a spying Captain Marvel into a solid-light hologram, and not much else. Most of the issue is an incomprehensible (literally) battle between God-Doom and the Beyonder, ending with Vic declaring, two issues before the cover says this series ends, that the “War is over.” I’m not buying it!

There’s a kind of pointless subplot where Wolverine accuses Captain America of being a racist out of nowhere; then, when Cap helps Logan rescue the imprisoned villains from their collapsing fortress, Wolvie decides Steve is all right, after all.

Also, there’s a cool moment where Doom appears in all his newfound god-ness and asks for followers to join him. Magneto is sorely tempted before the Avengers knock him down. Unfortunately, Shooter, again, does not really seem to know what to do with Magneto, who has a couple of neat scenes in this series that don’t ever add up to anything.

In sports they call this “limping to the finish line.”

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Crisis on Infinite Earths #10: “Death at the Dawn of Time!”

I may have been a bit hasty in judging last issue, as the opening of this one corrects a lot of the problems I had with the previous one. In a classic cliffhanger bait-and-switch, Brainiac takes out Psimon in the first two pages, having uploaded himself into his ship after Psimon seemed to kill him. We get way more interesting bouts in the Army of Heroes vs. Army of Villains battle, like the new Doom Patrol vs. Chemo and the Metal Men vs. the new Brotherhood of Evil.

Then a deus ex Spectre happens. Jim Corrigan’s ghostly half tells the heroes and villains to stop fighting, that the Anti-Monitor still lives (sucks to be you, Barry Allen) and has retreated to the beginning of time to do his cosmic devilry. The Spectre insists good and bad guys unite: Half will go to the Dawn of Time and stop the Anti-Monitor, and the other half must go to ancient Oa and stop Krona from splitting the universe in the first place.

Okay, I am confused. If, as my close-reading of Green Lantern #40 would seem to indicate, it’s Krona who created the anti-matter universe and therefore the Anti-Monitor, why are you sending a group to fight the Anti-Monitor? If you stop Krona from seeing the giant galaxy-holding hand thing, wouldn’t that stop the Anti-Monitor’s creation? So why wouldn’t you just send everybody to go fight Krona?

Luthor and Brainiac instantly pledge their evil forces to this crusade for some reason, and everyone gathers to jump into time machines brought by various time-traveling characters.

But… I thought all the time streams had merged along with the universes? Why do you need a time machine? Couldn’t you just… walk over there to the End of Time, or whatever? The universes aren’t just breaking down, so is anything resembling story logic.

Another example of something in #10 I reread multiple times and still don’t get: Anthro in his prehistoric era gets freaked out when a red sky appears overhead. Wait, didn’t this already happen? He says he’s not going to tell anyone from his tribe because they’ll think he’s crazy… but didn’t Anthro’s entire tribe wind up in the Batcave like six months ago (in spinner rack time)? I’m more confused than Anthro and I am only partially a caveman.

I know, shut up, Fred, it’s just a big loud superhero comic, but if you create a story-universe where literally anything can happen, where there’s no constraints and logic and reality get booted out the window, it’s very hard to give a crap about any of this. None of it feels like it genuinely “matters.”

In an indication the heroes don’t seem to be taking all of this terribly seriously either, somebody thought it was a good idea to send just the villains to stop Krona. Being evil, they’re all excited to genocide the Past Oans until the Past Oans turn their godlike powers on them. A motley trio of baddies—Icicle, Mirror Master and Maalador (who I had to look up)—break into Krona’s laboratory, but Krona promptly annihilates them. Cue Sad Trombone.

The heroes aren’t faring much better, as it turns out—psyche!—Anti-Monitor wanted them to attack him, see, because now he’s going to absorb all their energy and use it to blow up existence, see? All seems lost until the second deus ex Spectre happens. Giant Yelling Super-Ghost, as he’s known in Japan, is powered by the amassed sorcerers of the DCU and ready to throw down with the Anti-M.

Anyway, both armies fail, and the Multiverse goes kablooey. So what’s left are two more issues with nothing but white pages, right? Very meta of you, DC.

Wait! No! I refuse to be fooled by a cliffhanger again! I’ll be back next month. And so, I suspect will the DC Multi…uh. Universe?

This COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH is a tight call, since I didn’t really like either of these issues. (Could you tell?) I seem to be limping to the finish line, myself. My inclination is to declare Round 10 a tie, but that would screw up Dan’s scoring system (what is this, soccer?!). Y’know, I did genuinely like the opening of this issue, so:

ROUND 10 WINNER: CRISIS

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Our Tally So Far: CRISIS 6, SECRET WARS 4

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MORE

— COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH: Secret Wars #9 vs. Crisis on Infinite Earths #9. 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.