QUOTE: That was always the single biggest problem, dealing with Shooter. He lacked the communication skills to tell us what he wanted. He could only tell us what was "wrong", over and over and over again. The only way we knew when we finally got it "right" was that he'd start finding fault with something else.

Sounds like just about every client I had to deal with back when I was doing 3D animation. We always joked that what the client was really saying was, "That's not what I want. I don't know what I want, but out of the infinite possibilities of what it could be, you can scratch that one off the list."

I told my brother i wasn't going to buy Secret Wars and he shamed me into it because it was going to affect so much continuity in other titles.  "How can you not buy it?"  So I bought it and, except for the Layton art, hated it.  I don't even have a favorite Shooter book.  I've never liked anything he's done.  I can't see how he can tell anyone how to write.  I certainly didn't buy Secret Wars II, and even skipped some of the crossover appearances in book that I normally bought.

For the record, I think the "every other books an X-Men book" was the beginning of the end of respectability for Marvel.  Sure it helped them sell more mutant books, but it hurt the rest of the properties very badly. 

Then I stopped buying mutant books. 

 Then I stopped buying Marvel comics...except Thunderbolts!

The Secret Wars storyline seemed utterly contrived to me.  It reminded me of an old Giant Size Defenders book with that blue guy (The Grandmaster?) who made them fight the Squadron Supreme or something (been 25 years since I read it, so maybe I have the specifics wrong).

Heck, it even reminded me of The Gamesters of Triskelion ...

It reminded me of an old Giant Size Defenders book with that blue guy (The Grandmaster?) who made them fight the Squadron Supreme or something (been 25 years since I read it, so maybe I have the specifics wrong).

*******

You sure you don't mean The Avengers?  That is one of my favourite comics - where the Avengers come up against the Justice League Lite...it is one of the comics that I remember most clearly from my childhood - I must have been six (eep!) or so when I read it, one of the few American comics I ever got in its original form during the early seventies...it is one of the (many) reasons I bought Essential Avengers #4...and, nostalgia apart, it is still great to see so many super powered beings using their super powers - which is, after all, why I started reading comics in the first place....

(I'm still not clear how Thor shrank Hyperion and sealed him in a glass bubble, though....)

I've never read the Secret Wars books. What was so bad about them?

The first one is OK enough for what it is, but the characters are somewhat out of character.  Plus it did sorta wreak havoc with some of the monthlies at the time (as I recall, Doom was "dead" at the time in Fantastic Four, but suddenly- blammo- he's traipsing around the Beyonder's world hale and hearty with no explaination whatsoever as to how he "got better").  If you take it for what it was- a toy line tie-in where a whole lotta good guys fight a whole lotta bad guys- it's fun.

The second one?  Good lord in heaven above...it was just the Beyonder meandering around Earth doing dumb stuff that wasn't entertaining, exciting, or enlightening.  Plus as JB noted, it wreaked even more havoc with the monthly titles at the time.  Remember the "Hero" story in Fantastic Four?  Where the kid sets himself on fire because he idolizes the Human Torch (a clever riff on the urban myth that Johnny Storm wasn't in the late '70s FF cartoon because NBC was afraid kids would set themselves on fire after seeing him flame on)?  JB says in the Comic Creators on the Fantastic Four book that he was forced to use the Beyonder in that story.  To his credit, JB did manage to work the character into the story about as well as he could, but the presence of this cosmic entity in a very low-key, meaningful story was more than a little jarring.  That's the best example I can think of off the top of my head.  Bottom line is, Secret Wars I was pointless, but kind of fun.  Secret Wars II was pointless and oftentimes painful.

WHAT IF...

John Byrne created the Redunditator to beat the snot out of the Beyonder and correct the Shooterverse.