EDITOR EXCLUSIVE
Ahead of the 2027 Avengers movie, Marvel’s classic crossover Secret Wars celebrates its 40th anniversary
SET TO BE THE BASIS of 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars made comic book history when it was first published in 1984.
Written by Marvel’s then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and illustrated by Mike Zeck and Bob Layton, the 12-issue maxi-series was the first universe-wide superhero crossover, predating DC Comics’ Crisis On Infinite Earths by almost a year.
However, it was actually conceived as a tie-in with Mattel’s new line of action figures and playsets, which didn’t find favour with Marvel’s leading scripters at the time.
“Jim and I offered Secret Wars to a few of our top writers, but no one was interested in writing a ‘toy’ book,” recalls Secret Wars editor Tom De Falco, who also recently wrote the retro series Secret Wars: Battleworld. “After a long discussion, we decided that Jim was the best option and since Jim and I had worked on many projects together, I had no problems editing him. I was Marvel’s Executive Editor at the time – a job I was given after having written comics like Marvel Team-Up, Two-In-One and Machine Man and editing all the Spider-Man comics and titles like GI Joe and Ghost Rider. Since I’d worked with Mattel on the toy line, I was the obvious choice to edit the comic book.”
Initially created to tie-in with the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, Secret Wars was repurposed when the USA boycotted the event after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. The groundwork for the series had arguably been laid in 1982 by Mark Gruenwald, John Romita Jr and Bob Layton’s three-parter Contest Of Champions.
This centred on rival Elders of the Universe the Grandmaster and Death, who assemble two opposing teams of heroes to battle it out to obtain all four pieces of the Golden Globe of Life. “When Marvel finally decided to publish it as a miniseries, we were all quite surprised and pleased that it sold so well,” says De Falco, who maintains that Contest Of Champions didn’t actually have much influence on Secret Wars.
“Marvel routinely guest-starred various characters in each other’s books and we had many big events over the years.”
While the cast list was dictated by Mattel’s product line, Shooter had complete freedom when it came to devising Secret Wars’ central premise, which involved malevolent cosmic being the Beyonder transporting a diverse range of heroes and villains – such as Spider-Man, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom and Kang the Conqueror – to the planet of Battleworld, and pitting them against each other.
“Since we were producing the comic to support the toy line, we focused
