In 1984, Marvel launched the year long Secret Wars miniseries as one of its first major crossovers. Next year, Marvel is revisiting the concept with a new Secret Wars miniseries by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic.
While the new Secret Wars is spilling out of Hickman’s run on the Avengers titles, it may be more closely tied to the original Secret Wars miniseries than we initially believed. Today, Marvel released a Secret Wars teaser video that depicted the formation of a new Battleworld, which is comprised of several different alternate Marvel timelines.
Note that this is what all of the teasers for Civil War, Future Imperfect, X-Men ‘92, Age of Apocalypse and several others were promoting as they each have a spot on the Battleworld map.
During the original Secret Wars, the seemingly all-powerful being known as the Beyonder created Battleworld out of pieces from several different planets and he/it put the heroes and villains of Earth into conflict with each other with ultimate power as the prize.
The Beyonder has reappeared a few times since his apparent death in Secret Wars II. And it is highly suspicious that someone is following the Beyonder’s original plan so closely within the Marvel Universe. If the Beyonder is back and at full power, then he/it could once again be the primary antagonist of Secret Wars.
Secret Wars # 1 will launch in May 2015.
