Posted By Dan Greenfield on Dec 16, 2024 | 10 comments

This is it! The big finale! Which maxiseries reigns supreme???

We’ve hit the end of the road. Fred Van Lente’s COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH returned in 2024 as a monthly feature, pitting Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars against DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.

See, Marvel this year celebrated the 40th anniversary of 1984’s 12-issue 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 been 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 6, Secret Wars 5. (The Secret Wars #12 Facsimile Edition is out Wednesday, Dec. 18, and so is the Crisis on Infinite Earths #9 Facsimile Edition.)

Will Crisis pull out a 7-5 victory, or will Secret Wars end this thing in a 6-6 draw?

Ring the bell, Fred!

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Marvel Super Hero Secret Wars #12: “…Nothing to Fear…”

What Secret Wars has had over Crisis this whole time, in this reader’s eyes, is that it’s trying to tell a straightforward story about characters whose motivations I clearly understand: Some people, kidnapped to an alien world, have to fight to survive and get home.

Is it an overly simplistic story to sell toys? Yes. Is it a ripoff of a Star Trek episode? Yes. (Actually, of two Star Trek episodes? Double yes.) But because it only exists to sell toys, it is also trying to be a relatable story for everybody, not just rabid fans.

On the other hand, Crisis is very much by and for hardcore DC readers. For that reason I have found it, at times, nigh incomprehensible in its storytelling, like getting stuck behind your comic con table by an overeager fan that won’t stop talking your ear off. So I am more inclined toward Secret Wars from the jump.

That said…

Knowing Marvel’s relationship with DC as I do—which is to say, the former being the schoolyard bully who lives to beat up the latter for his lunch money—I would assume Jim Shooter caught wind of Crisis’ development and declared that Secret Wars would be 12 issues too and rushed out first… without really bothering to plot out 12 issues worth of story.

There’s been a bunch of clues to this throughout, none more glaring than the first half of this double-size final issue, which involves intra-villain conflict on the chunk of Denver floating back to Earth. Nothing about this 10-page sequence is bad per se, but none of it adds up to anything. Other than this weird bit where Enchantress summons a naked bath nymph to give her exposition, and that only added up to titillating pre-pubescent Fred.

Back on Battleworld, God-Doom has seemingly killed all the heroes, but Klaw lays out for him a scenario in which they could have all survived, through the intervention of alien healer Zsaji, who dies imparting her life force to maybe-boyfriend Colossus.

And here we see the problem with embarking on a 12-issue maxiseries without a plan fully laid out beforehand, which is not just that you get sidetracked by filler scenes with a Bath Nymph, you also start to cut corners by plagiarizing yourself.

Because this is largely the same scenario laid out in the climax of the justly-lauded “Korvac Saga,” an Avengers storyline from just six years prior, largely written by Secret Wars’ Jim Shooter and largely drawn by none other than Crisis on Infinite Earths MVP George Perez. (Though said climax, Avengers #177, was pencilled by Dave Wenzel.)

As in Secret Wars, an army of heroes (in this instance, pretty much anyone who’s ever been an Avenger plus the original Guardians of the Galaxy) faces off against a godlike megalomaniac who got so by stealing energy from a more powerful cosmic being—Korvac, a one-off cyborg villain who syphoned off Galactus juju from his house (sound familiar?).

The Avengers #177 (left). Secret Wars #11 (right).

As in Secret Wars, the heroes are killed in a valiant attempt to stop the villain, who, again, we’re expected to believe is vaguely noble (and, like God-Doom, hasn’t actually done anything to warrant the heroes’ attack, but they dogpile him nonetheless). Captain America even gets to be the “regular joe” standing up to the omnipotent threat in the end, however ineffectively.

The Avengers #177 (left). Secret Wars #12 (right).

As in Secret Wars, a minor love interest saves the day: here it’s Korvac’s girlfriend Carina, daughter of the Collector, who doubts Korvac at the last second, shaming him (Korvac) into restoring all the heroes as his dying act. (In one of the odder MCU reinterpretations of a comics character, Carina turns up in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie not as the Collector’s beloved daughter, but as his abused slave.)

The Avengers #177 (left). Secret Wars #12 (right).

Part of the reason this is so much more effective in “Korvac Saga” is that most of Avengers #177 is a brutal fight between the heroes and Korvac; they aren’t passively struck down by a bolt from the blue. The most active main character of the entire third act of something called Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars turns out to be… Doctor Doom.

That’s just weird, man.

Vic spends the second half of this issue being manipulated by Klaw, who turns out to be possessed by a weakened Beyonder, tricking Doom into restoring him. The antagonists vanish, the heroes figure out how to send everybody back home—except for Rocky Grimm, Space Ranger, who decides to stay behind because he can turn back and forth to and from the Thing at will on Battleworld.

While I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the ending of Secret Wars is terrible or anything, it also can’t help but remind me of a much better comic, to its detriment.

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Crisis on Infinite Earths #12: “Final Crisis”

For all the times he’s seemingly been killed, just to get back up again, the Anti-Monitor is kind of a cosmic Jason Voorhees at this point. Because this is the last issue, his clock has mercifully run out, in a big mama-jama fight that has a very cool re-introduction of his shadow minions in a terrific sequence of panels by Perez. “The darkness is alive!” indeed.

“Things ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings,” Deadman says in what I think might be the best line of the series, “an’ I ain’t seen an opera yet that ended happier than it began.”

The heroes take the fight to the ruins of Qward, where they find an insane Psycho Pirate grappling with the dead Flash’s costume. A bunch of C-listers die kind of perfunctorily — no! Not you, Prince Ra-Man! Dr. Light absorbs the power of a sun and blasts the Anti-Monitor down with the help of a bunch of other energy-based heroes, your Firestorms and the like.

But the combined mass of the shadow demons, shot away by the efforts of the mystic heroes, get drawn to A-M’s corpse and resurrect him (heavy sigh) AGAIN. Earth-Two Wonder Woman gets blasted to oblivion, and Earth-Two Superman and Superboy-Prime show up to engage him directly. (I know he becomes a Big Bad later on, but I have yet to read the DC Comics Presents issue that explains who Superboy-Prime is.) They blow away the Anti-Montior’s armor, leaving a glowing skeleton. As boss fights go, I’ve played video games with cleaner endings, but so far, so good.

There’s also a fun B-story involving a bunch of rando heroes (Dolphin, Adam Strange, Animal Man, etc.) on Brainiac’s ship going to Apokolips to enlist Darkseid’s help against the A-M. In a neat bit, Darkseid channels his Omega Beams through Alex Luthor’s trans-dimensional eyes and blows away the Anti-Monitor.

NOW is he dead? Nope, this comic has a couple more endings in it yet. He comes back as a screaming giant gas head, who gets punched so hard by SM-2 that the resulting shockwaves disintegrate everything for a million miles in all directions. Rude! That takes out the Superpeople and Earth-Two Lois Lane, who gets brought back by Harbinger to die in the arms of her Kryptonian squeeze. (If I was her, I’d be like, “Thanks…?”)

There are lots of funerals, Wally West becomes the Flash—he was always my favorite—and Psycho-Pirate gets locked up in an insane asylum as the only person who actually remembers the Infinite Earths… except Grant Morrison, who has him meet up with Animal Man in just a few years, thus beginning the process of unraveling everything Wolfman and Perez set up here in record time, which I am going to guess annoyed somebody.

The main Creative Writing 101 complaint to be made about Crisis is, who is the main character? I have no idea. Secret Wars has the same problem, but there are literally 50 times more characters in the DC book—it seems to be trying to set the Guinness World Record for cameos—and everybody individually gets less air time than in the Marvel one, making even more of a muddle.

For Crisis, I guess you could say the main character is Earth-Two Superman, a character I didn’t really understand existed until this maxiseries, but I keep getting beaten over the head that he is the greatest hero of all time (because he’s the first, presumably?) and his ending is suitably moving.

These are both flawed series with the exact opposite problem: Secret Wars doesn’t have enough story to justify its runtime, and Crisis has way too much going on for its own good. It is an ambitious, sloppy mess, but I am a big fan of those, too. Plus, the last issue is stronger. Ergo:

ROUND 12 WINNER: CRISIS

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And so, by the power invested in me by the North American Comic Book Death Match Commission — of which I am the sole member — I declare the winner, on points, to be: CRISIS, 7-5.

This has been an interesting exercise! I had originally intended to do both series as a single column but Dan talked me into doing it as a year-long 12-parter, and it’s been a lot of fun. I thank you all for taking the journey with me and I hope you found my observations entertaining, amusing, and occasionally thought-provoking.

You haven’t completely gotten rid of me yet, though, because I am working my way through the 100-ish (!) Crisis tie-in titles and I’ll be back next month with a TOP 13 of them, just as I did at the beginning of the year with the Secret Wars tie-ins.

Then, what to tackle next? My impulse is to do the big team-up books, The Brave and the Bold vs. Marvel Team-Up and DC Comics Presents vs. Marvel-Two-in-One. What do you think, gang? Let me know in the comments.

If I have a vote — and as editor and publisher of this here digital rag, I do — I’d go with B&B and MTU! — Dan

Until next time, friends: May your Mylar bags ever have untaped flaps! Scotch tape is the mortal enemy of comics covers!

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MORE

— COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH: Secret Wars #11 vs. Crisis on Infinite Earths #11. 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.