Making Sense of Secret Wars - Is it Possible?

[Johnatellodi]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to discuss the timeline/continuity that's been branching out since Hickman's run on Avengers, and discuss whether the Secret Wars/Post Secret Wars timeline

A. Makes sense from a chronological standpoint - "How does T'Challa go back in time 8 months, yet everything else still plays out the same up until the incursion?" (Please feel free to chime in on this one), questions regarding Miles and his placement in the Prime Universe - who came with him? Family? Friends? Family of friends?? and other assorted questions regarding the timeline.

B. Needs to make sense - Is this all a big kerfuffle over essentially nothing? Is the true answer just "DUDE, comics are fiction, people don't get spider-powers, stop worrying about semantics!" (Which I don't personally agree with, especially when it comes to a property so richly entrenched in continuity).

C. Went as intended - Did the Writers, editors, and artists think this through? Is there a sense of cohesion or has cohesive continuity been all but forgotten since Secret Wars and Earth Prime were created.

To cap it off, Secret Wars has been giving me a giant Marvel headache, whenever I try and pick up a recent Marvel book. I'm not usually so particular about continuity, but at this point it's about as messy as DC's continuity in the new 52 and it's actively turning me away from future books. Reading Legacy #1, nearly all i could think about was whether this Prime Universe even makes any sense.
I'm also left wondering if some of the in-story retcons in Legacy #1, such as "Voyager" being an original Avenger, is some type of lead into cleaning this whole mess up.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, explanations, and discussions.

[JKtheMac]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to discuss the timeline/continuity that's been branching out since Hickman's run on Avengers, and discuss whether the Secret Wars/Post Secret Wars timeline

A. Makes sense from a chronological standpoint - "How does T'Challa go back in time 8 months, yet everything else still plays out the same up until the incursion?" (Please feel free to chime in on this one), questions regarding Miles and his placement in the Prime Universe - who came with him? Family? Friends? Family of friends?? and other assorted questions regarding the timeline.

B. Needs to make sense - Is this all a big kerfuffle over essentially nothing? Is the true answer just "DUDE, comics are fiction, people don't get spider-powers, stop worrying about semantics!" (Which I don't personally agree with, especially when it comes to a property so richly entrenched in continuity).

Some people are going to chime in and agree with you that somehow T'Challa went back in time but he didn't. What actually happened was he got the Infinity Stone to give him the old Wakanda back in the current timeline. It was a fudge of reality. As you are probably aware everything happened just the same as before as proven in the post SW Wakanda books.

The post Secret Wars world is actually a subtle reboot and a change of reality. Things are different now, and have always been so. Events look very similar but they are not.

We have discussed and argued about this very issue over and over in these forums. Look for the long Secret Wars thread for a rambling discussion of this and lots of other issues. Feel free to bring that thread back if you want. I miss it.

[SuperiorIronman]

The Incursions still happened. Post-Secret Wars 2015 we got multiple instances of the Incursions being referenced or damages from it still in play (some worlds are still gone but the old numbering system is still used, SHIELD made a statement on the Incursions, The Maker). Reed and family put much of reality back together so as far as an overall timeline is concerned, Black Panther can return to that moment. Once Reed takes charge he restores things so Black Panther now has a world to go back to and may have had assistance from Reed if the Infinity Gauntlet he used wasn't enough, which makes sense as everyone else got back.

The thing is however is that divergences do exist however. Most notably the world having ended, and then didn't. Or things are brought over from other realities like Miles Morales and The Maker. The Incursion crisis still happened, it's just that history is also slightly altered now in certain areas. Battleworld was still a thing and even Victor Von Doom still remembers these events.

The easiest answer is that everything still occurred and that once everything was put back together things continued with additions and some alterations to history. Everything that happened is still relevant, it's just that post-Secret Wars things got reshuffled on a larger level similar to that of the Infinity Gauntlet with things getting reset.

[gurkle]

I'm in the cynical "Secret Wars changed nothing" camp.

For there to be a continuity reboot there would have to be an agreed-upon continuity that all writers and editors followed, within broad strokes. But the way things work after Secret Wars seems exactly the way they worked before: writers and editors feel free to change or overlook details of continuity that don't fit the story they're telling.

I'm not saying that's a bad approach. Sometimes it makes more sense than the very continuity-conscious approach that Mark Gruenwald preferred. It's just that I don't see any indication that writers post-Secret Wars are working from a different continuity. They're basically taking the approach that Bendis and Hickman and many other writers have been taking since the '00s: this is sort of in the same continuity as the others, but don't get too hung up on the details.

So a series like Vision uses more continuity than Hickman (who had no interest in Avengers history), but it gets a few details wrong in the flashbacks. When I see that I just assume that the writer and editor got stuff wrong, or overlooked details to make them fit the story better. It's fine to say, "well, this reflects the changed history post-Secret Wars." But that's not an approach I personally like. I prefer to assume that the continuity remains exactly as it was, and mistakes are sometimes made.

[JKtheMac]

C. Went as intended - Did the Writers, editors, and artists think this through? Is there a sense of cohesion or has cohesive continuity been all but forgotten since Secret Wars and Earth Prime were created.

To cap it off, Secret Wars has been giving me a giant Marvel headache, whenever I try and pick up a recent Marvel book. I'm not usually so particular about continuity, but at this point it's about as messy as DC's continuity in the new 52 and it's actively turning me away from future books. Reading Legacy #1, nearly all i could think about was whether this Prime Universe even makes any sense.
I'm also left wondering if some of the in-story retcons in Legacy #1, such as "Voyager" being an original Avenger, is some type of lead into cleaning this whole mess up.

To speak to this specific point, I believe the writers all discussed that Secret Wars was going to fold in the 1610 and the 616 into a single universe, and pull in a number of characters from other universes while they were at it, and everyone knew this vaguely. However it was a potential logistics nightmare to not only get the whole of Marvel to walk in step and all understand how each story was to develop and change based upon Secret Wars.

Instead they hatched a plan to leave a gap before and after Secret Wars. The gap before allowed some writers to write up until the end, and bring their arc to a close The gap at the beginning allowed everyone to continue their stories as if they were in a normal universe and without having to worry about the deeper questions.

The real problem came when it became clear many of the writers had different understandings of what had changed and what was now allowed. That was also compounded by the fact that some left gaps and alluded to post Secret Wars events, like the supposed Cyclops issue for example, and then editorial seemed to change their tack.

There was even a semi-serious war over using 616 between the spider-office and Brevoort.

What this amounts to isn't really that important. The only difference is now we have a few 1610 characters, a few New Universe characters, a resurrection of Wakanda from the ashes including the whole population, and mostly everything else is much the same.