Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars: The Epic 1980s Saga

Just in time for Avengers: Secret Wars later this month, Tom Mason’s Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars: The Epic 1980s Saga dives deep on the seminal comics crossover that inspired the movie and changed the comics business forever, ushering in an age of must-read annual publisher-wide comics crossovers. Available now from Bloomsbury Academic, Secret Wars is part of their new Marvel Age of Comics imprint, spotlighting the most important moments in Marvel history, both on the page and in the creative bullpens where the decisions are made.

Author Tom Mason dropped by Hourglass secret headquarters to answer my burning questions about his new book. 

Give us some background about yourself and your life in comics.

Well, I’m one of the founders of Malibu Comics, where I was an editor and then a Marketing VP, in addition to being one of the people who helped run the joint. I was the launch editor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the launch editor of Bravura, and I created Dinosaurs For Hire. I’m also one of the founders of the Ultraverse. And that’s not even half of it!

The other half of it being your non-comics writing. You’ve worked in television for many years – and there’s even an Emmy in there someplace, right?

Oh that, yeah! I worked way more in TV than comics. After Marvel bought Malibu, I hung around for almost a year, but I got an itch to do something else. So I got an agent and started writing TV shows. I worked a lot in animation with my creative partner Dan Danko. We have credits on more than 600 episodes of various shows in various capacities, and in between all of that we also wrote some childrens’ books. But I’ve never, ever lost my love of making comics. I’m working on a couple of things now that’ll be out in 2027.

Why Secret Wars? Why now?

It’s been over 40 years since the original series, and it started as just two words generated by committee at Mattel and mashed together to create a comic to sell a line of toys. 

Wasn’t “Secret Wars” two words focus-tested to drive 12-year-old boys out of their minds?

Yes, Mattel told Marvel that boys responded to “secret” and “war” as trigger words. And Mattel’s corporate research proved correct. Secret Wars became a phenomenon, it sold super well, the title became a brand, and it’s arguably writer Jim Shooter’s creative legacy. Also, it’s the title of the Avengers: Secret Wars movie coming out in 2027.

I may have heard something about that movie. Did you ever meet Shooter, or work with him?

Teenage me met him once at a party on the upper east side of New York the night before one of the big Seuling cons. He knew the hosts, so he was dropping in to say hi. He was just editor-in-chief then at Marvel. We had one conversation that was about nothing, but he struck me as friendly. Years later, 1993-1994, Malibu Comics’ co-president Bob Jacob was obsessed with bringing in Shooter to be the EIC of the Ultraverse (“That guy sells comics!”). So I was tasked with Malibu’s Dave Olbrich and Dan Danko to take him out to lunch for part of the job interview. He didn’t understand the power dynamics at Malibu and at that lunch acted like he was being forced to play with the neighbor’s kids. He couldn’t have been less interested in us as people. Needless to say, he didn’t join the company.

Alas, but “What If?” was never my favorite Marvel book, anyway. Secret Wars, though – I remember thinking the way it was inserted into the main Marvel line was brilliant. The whole crossover seemed to happen between months in the Marvel Universe – everything is going along normally, then suddenly Spider-Man has a black suit and Ben Grimm has gone missing. Want to find out how that all happened? Then you need to read this twelve-issue series, kid!

That’s one of the genius moves of the series. Shooter front-loaded all of the changes to affect the books the same month that Secret Wars #1 was released. It’s a masterstroke of marketing, especially with the highly-debated change to Spider-Man’s costume. It really built demand. I’m surprised that subsequent blockbuster comics didn’t employ that kind of strategy or understand the big bang marketing approach of Secret Wars that went beyond the actual story.

That format also did remarkably little damage to the experience of being a monthly Marvel reader. Secret Wars felt like a bonus – not a crossover that stopped every book dead to sync up with some remote external story. This kind of line-wide event was a new thing for comics, and we didn’t appreciate the sea change it would represent. 

Marvel had teased a new Spider-Man costume, and that news had divided the audience, which is a good way to drive up sales. But I had no idea how big it was going to be or that we’d still be talking about it four decades later.

Hadn’t thought of dividing the audience as a way to drive up sales – and this was largely without the outrage flywheel of social media. Now I think I understand why you trumpeted that letter from an “outraged Beatle fan” in an early issue of Dinosaurs For Hire.

Yes, no publicity is bad publicity. Back then, there wasn’t a full-on outrage machine and people weren’t generally creating marketing plans to divide public opinion and use that rage. But it certainly happened on Secret Wars!

After critically re-reading Secret Wars as a single work in preparation for your book, did you find that any themes or meanings emerged that weren’t obvious when reading a monthly book back in 1984?

It’s interesting because Shooter has generally denied that his work has greater meanings. He’ll claim he’s just a storyteller. However, there’s a pattern to his work that he returns to several times. For example, an obvious villain will want to do a harsh thing, something mean and villainous. If the people will just go along with it and listen to him, and let him get his way, it’s going to turn out great for everybody. This is a parallel to how Shooter worked in comics as an editor and as a manager. I’m not a psychologist, but I do find it fascinating.

And I’m not an interviewer, but I have to dig into that. Maybe analyzing Shooter is a whole different book, but just concentrating on Secret Wars, didn’t Shooter pretty much get his way? And if so – did that make him a permanent prisoner of past success? I never met the man but he struck me as the kind of guy who felt his being smart in one area made him smart in every area.

Yeah, well, digging into that, there’s some fascinating stuff to think about. For example, I think you can make a case that Shooter really did get his way on Secret Wars - he dictated the changes he wanted to make to characters that other editors controlled. He even bragged in interviews that nobody could disagree with him on it. He pulled the artists that he wanted from an already-successful book to work on his project. He changed Marvel’s royalty structure to benefit him. He ended up doing his own layouts for the series to get what he wanted. And more than once he threw out completed pages to rewrite an issue. I think the lesson he took from all of that was that he was the key to the series’ success.

He immediately greenlit a sequel, even though the first series was still unfinished. He had once proposed to kill off the Marvel characters for being too old, so he could help create all new characters that weren’t tied to early Marvel creators. Then he created the New Universe and pushed that through. That was his first big failure. Behind the scenes, he also made a grab for more business power, and that was his undoing at Marvel. If he’d stayed as an editor and writer, that might’ve become his greatest legacy, but he seemed to need to roll the dice in the Big Casino whenever he got the chance.

I can understand why Shooter might keep raising the stakes. Secret Wars was an early example of the kind of “trans-media” play every publisher chases today. The series started as a toy line that no one remembers.

The book goes into the failure of the toy line, and the distance that Mattel kept from the Secret Wars comics. Mattel went cheap on the toys, and seemed to have lost interest even though the comics sold like crazy. I think what some people in power failed to realize back then is that despite publishers claiming that their comics were for kids, the largest segment of the audience was not kids. The bulk of the audience was older, and not buying toys to play with. The idea of making collectible toys and action figures for that older audience with disposable cash was not yet a strategy.

Where would either of us be without arrested development!

I would be nowhere. It’s my greatest attribute and occasionally my absolute downfall socially!

Aside from reading the books, what original research did you conduct in putting together this book? Did you speak with any of the creators or editorial people behind Secret Wars?

The book is more an examination than a history, but I wanted to talk to some people to provide context. I talked to some people who worked at Marvel at the time like Eliot R. Brown and Danny Fingeroth. I talked to Milton Griepp who ran Capital City Distribution. I talked to former DC President Paul Levitz. About a dozen or so people gave me a lot of insight and perspective and historical nuggets. 

Any nuggets from those people that didn’t make the book, but you’d still like to share?

Here’s one. I always thought that Marvel and DC staffers kept their distances from each other except for their occasional summer softball rivalries. I knew DC’s Paul Levitz had a regular poker game that had regulars and drop-ins. 

I see that Paul Levitz also has a launch title in this Marvel Age of Comics imprint – Marvel Explodes: From Bullpen to Big Business. Looking forward to that one.

Me too. I’ve read a couple of brief excerpts online, and it’s totally in my nerd wheelhouse. What I didn’t know is that for a couple of years, Shooter was a regular at Levitz’s games. And he was not a good poker player.

I can only cross my fingers that Mr. Levitz covers those poker games in his book! The business side of comics fascinates me just as much as the comics themselves – those poker games relationships are a kind of secret wars all by themselves. Years after Secret Wars, Malibu Comics became a part of Marvel Comics, and you were part of orchestrating crossovers between the Ultraverse and the Marvel Universe. Any dotted lines you care to connect between Secret Wars and that era, such as how big cross-overs evolved from one-offs to expected events?

I think the connected dot is that Secret Wars established the crossover as a legitimate tool in a publisher’s toolbox, both creatively and as a marketing strategy. It’s a way to bring things together that might not normally fit, and that you can tell a story that either fits into continuity or doesn’t have to. It’s a way to generate excitement, facilitate change, introduce new characters, and even pump up sales a bit. Secret Wars made the crossover a blockbuster event and the comics industry has been chasing that high ever since.

It’s a lesson Marvel Studios has taken to heart, with varying results. And now we’ve come full circle, with Marvel Studios making their own Secret Wars picture. Care to place any bets about how much of the canonical Secret Wars we will see show up in the movie? How about one thing from the comics you’d love to see but are certain they’d never do?

Good question! The movie people have made no secret (!) that it’s not going to be an adaptation of the Secret Wars mini-series, so it might exist onscreen in name only. We’ll have to wait and see. I would love to see some of the characters that haven’t shown up before - like Spider Woman, Titania and Volcana. Marvel movies generally could use some more female characters. It would be great to bring in “the alien healer named Zsaji.” She’s kind of a cypher as a character so there’s plenty to work with, and she has a handy power.

It will be enough for me if they explain how Robert Downey Junior can be both Tony Stark and Doctor Doom at the same time – though, knowing comics, any explanation will likely make everything more complicated. Maybe we’ll find out he’s also Sherlock Holmes! Calling it here first!

But we will have to wait until the end of 2027 to answer those burning questions, so in the meantime, maybe I’ll re-read Secret Wars … with Tom’s new book as my guide. You can order Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars: The Epic 1980s Saga from Amazon, and I’m sure your local bookseller would appreciate your business, too! But beware — get one of these attractive, handbook-sized volumes in hand and you may find you want to collect them all.

You can find Tom on Bluesky where he and I talk all things comics and pop culture.

Thanks to Tom for dropping by … and if you’d like to read another Hourglass author interview, check out our conversation with Anna Scotti on publication of her short story collection, It’s Not Even Past.