LUDIC LOG

"Yeah, let's bring back the Jheri curl, white jumpsuit motherfucker in all his eighties glory. No, I am proud to say that this is not that. Not to shit on others' work, but Secret Wars II was douche chill bad." (Brian Michael Bendis)

So, Brian Michael Bendis -- the man who has brought the world some the best (Powers), most entertaining (Ultimate Spider-Man), and most incomprehensible (the issue of Powers that featured a couple of monkeys fucking for 15 pages) comics of the 2000s -- has decided to take on the Secret Wars franchise, one of the worst, most asinine comics of the 1980s. Although he's avoiding some obvious pitfalls (setting in the "Ultimates" universe, keeping the scale manageable, not letting Jim Shooter or Al Milgrom within a million miles of the thing), one has to wonder: are there some properties so inherently rotten that no writer, no matter how talented, can save them? Perhaps he was inspired by the example of Alan Moore, who managed to turn Supreme into something...well, not good, exactly, but less awful than you might expect from a title so completely covered in Liefeld-stink.

Still, it's an odd choice. For a comics creator at the top of his game and with a huge amount of clout in the business to tackle a series almost universally mentioned as one of the worst of all time makes you wonder if he's really in need of a challenge, or if he's just started believing his own hype. After all, Bill Sienkiewicz and Alan Moore left New Mutants and Swamp Thing to do stuff like From Hell, Stray Toasters and Big Numbers, not to do revivals of Ironjaw and Team America. I have to believe that Bendis has a big project in his head, and it's a tad more grand than just doing Secret Wars II II.

But, I am nothing if not helpful. I have never hesitated to give advice to talented creators, regardless or whether or not it is solicited, useful, or capable of being communicated to the person at which it is directed. In the knowledge that against my better judgment I may actually buy this thing, and in the interests of not having it smell like a beachfront crack house at low tide, I offer the following suggestion to Mr. Bendis: how to make your Secret Wars sequel not suck. Or, at least, suck less.

1. Do not draw it yourself. I think this one pretty much goes without saying.

2. Do not let Al Milgrom draw it, either. This one goes even more without saying.

3. Resist any urge to let Rob Liefeld have anything to do with it, and that extends to reading it. I don't know what it is with you people and Liefeld, but trust me: he is like radioactivity. Everything he touches is poisoned forever. Just because you're starting to talk like him doesn't mean you have to become him.

4. Do not put the Beyonder in it. This may seem odd; the Beyonder, after all, was the wheel that drove the Secret Wars vehicle. True enough. But you may recall that the Secret Wars vehicle was a broken-down Yugo whose engine was on fire and whose trunk was stuffed with fertilizer. The Beyonder is a profoundly stupid character who was even worse in execution than he was in conception. Loath as I am to make blanket statments like this, it is entirely possible that no one can write a good story with the Beyonder in it. Just as, no matter how well it is designed, no one can make an airworthy jet plane out of bricks, no one can make a tasty sandwich out of shit and no one can write a great comic book story starring the Beyonder. Redoing Secret Wars without him is not so much re-forming the Beatles without John Lennon as it is re-forming the News without Huey Lewis: pointless, yes, but at least it's not as bad as it could be.

5. Drop the whole "Wars" angle. Whenever a comic book series has the word 'war' in it, we are supposed to thing that involves an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil, allayed against one another in a titanic and legendary clash from which no one is exempt. In reality, though, what is really going on is a much more expensive version of that game where you'd put all your action figures together in a shoe box and have them "fight". In other words, it's a lot more fun in your own head than it is on the printed page. You obviously intend to try to sidestep this by using the scaled-back "Ultimates" universe as your backdrop, but the "Ultimates" universe gets bigger (and dumber: see Ultimate Fantastic Four) every day, and in the end you'll end up with many more characters and much less characterization.

6. Drop the whole "Secret" angle, too. The reason most epic crossover series since Crisis on Infinite Earths have failed is because they're not playing for big enough stakes. When you have a mini-series that cuts across all your titles and involves everyone under the sun, it's important that the consequences matter -- that you're going to kill a shitload of people, make major changes in your continuity, and revamp your line in a pretty significant way. One reason that Secret Wars failed was that there weren't these sweeping, long-term consequences for the most part, and where there were, they sucked. With the "Ultimates" universe, there aren't enough characters to support a widespread culling, there isn't enough continuity for making wholesale changes to it to be very meaningful, and the line is not only fairly small, but it's also predicated on the very notion of redefining continuity, so adding another layer of ret-con on top of that seems like busywork.

7. Don't actually do it at all. Come to think of it, forget the first six and just remember this one.