During it’s era that the publisher labeled as Marvel Now, the line of superhero titles was marked with excellent individual ongoing series paired with bad crossovers & limp events. But while the series of that era like Thor, Ms Marvel, Hawkeye, Young Avengers, Moon Knight & others are sure to go down as some of the most important comics of their time, it’s notable that Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers/New Avengers probably won’t be listed among them or at least didn’t feel that way in real time as it was wildly inconsistent in quality despite having one of comics best modern writer. So perhaps it’s irony or just a natural byproduct of Hickman’s vision on the book, but it’s turned out that  his best work during Marvel Now comes at the conclusion of that period on Secret Wars, the publishers biggest crossover event ever. Still, that context is somewhat reductive as Hickman, Ribic & Svocina’s Secret Wars has completely upended the notion of an event book, superhero continuity constraints & the Marvel fictional universe in and of itself to create one of the best comics of 2015 by reverse engineering all of Marvel’s past story cannon as a meta-textual commentary on the publisher fictional history, where by changing one key detail explains the essential quality of what it means to be a superhero. Continue reading This Year’s Finest 2015: Secret Wars Show’s Me A Hero →