Marvel Announces New Secret Wars Event in 2015

Marvel’s next big event titled Secret Wars was announced this past week at New York Comic Con, which will be released in May 2015 as a 12 issue year long series, written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Esad Ribic. The event will lead directly out of Jonathan Hickman’s current storyline and conclusion on his run of Avengers and New Avengers, titled Time Runs Out.

Longtime Marvel fans might recall that Secret Wars was Marvel’s first big event back in 1984, that was originally thought up as a marketing ploy, along with a partnership with Mattel in order to make up a line of toys to sell with the release of the comic series. In the series a cosmic character called the Beyonder while observing earth, transported many of Marvel’s heroes and villains in order to square off against one another against their will on a planet aptly named Battleworld. The 12 issue series also was the first appearance of Spider-Man’s black costume which he donned for awhile after the conclusion of the event, which eventually turned out to be the alien symbiote we now know as Venom and many other Spider-Man story lines.

While the plot and inception of the past event was very much in the 80’s vein of comics, Hickman said that he wanted to revisit the classic crossover but tell the story in a different way. Although with this announcement the more things change the more things stay the same, Marvel also announced partnerships to sell merchandise based off the event from toy company Hasbro, Gentle Giant, and retailer Hot Topic.

So in conclusion this all sounds great for Marvel in terms of a company event, where they will continue to make multi millions, in sales and merchandise, but what about us readers?  The real question is will this turn out to be an event worth mentioning amongst comic fans in terms of a memorable story that we will be talking about for years to come. Given Marvel’s track record with event sales withheld I highly doubt this, although the pairing of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic is a great creative team to have at the helm, so I will look forward to checking it out nonetheless and only time will tell.

Source: CBR