Warning: Contains spoilers for Fantastic Four: Reckoning War #1
The Marvel Universe is a very big place, or at least that's what readers believed until now. A shocking revelation from Fantastic Four: Reckoning War #1 exposes a secret that will change the future of the Marvel Universe forever.
The Reckoning War is Marvel's fresh new big event, revolving around the Fantastic Four, who will lead the heroes from Earth into a conflict that spans the whole universe. Until the release of the first issue, very little was known about this war, besides the fact that it involved the usually pacifistic race of the Watchers, and that it was a return of "the first war in the Marvel Universe." However, Reckoning War's mastermind Dan Slott revealed that he has been planting the seeds for this storyline for 15 years, starting from his critically acclaimed run on She-Hulk. Slott also said that the idea first came to him from a comic he read when he was eight years old in 1975, and from that detail it was possible, with some in-depth research, to guess the villains of the Reckoning War.
In the early days of the universe, the Watchers, then known as the Luminous, wanted to use their vast knowledge and power to help other species develop. They visited other planets and shared their gifts with the inhabitants, but knowledge can be a dangerous weapon without the wisdom to utilize it. One of these other species used the Watchers' technology to develop weapons of mass destruction and ended up destroying themselves, which led to the Watchers' oath of non-interference. Or at least, that was the story until now. Fantastic Four: Reckoning War #1 - by Dan Slott, Carlos Pacheco, Rafael Fonteriz, Carlos Magno, and Guru-eFX - reveals that the Watchers always kept the true magnitude of that "first war" hidden, along with its consequences.
The mysterious "first race" from the past are the inhabitants of planet Prosilicus, who used the Watchers' gifts to become an intergalactic empire devoted to conquest and destruction, taking the name of the Reckoning. To stop them, every other civilization united, and in the final battle a "last resort weapon" was unleashed (it is still unclear by whom), releasing into the universe a lethal amount of cosmic energies that caused a toxic fallout so powerful that "everything the wave touched, it turned to ash." After nine-tenths of the universe were laid to waste, the Watchers were force to intervene, combining their powers to create a protective barrier around the part of the cosmos that was still untouched. The rest was sealed off, creating a toxic wasteland where the Reckoning could supposedly not survive. Billions of years later, the leader of the Prosilicans, calling himself Wrath, has not only survived but is also ready to exact his revenge on the Watchers and the rest of the universe.
These revelations will have huge ramifications for the future, regardless of what the outcome of the Reckoning War will be. What was until now believed to be the Marvel Universe is, in fact, only one-tenth of the original creation. This is best expressed by Reed Richards' shock in learning the truth: "I used to think it was so vast! Infinite! But it's not. It's such a small, fragile, thing." The scope of this epiphany is so vast that it could retcon the entire Marvel history. For example, when Thanos used the Infinity Gauntlet to kill half of the universe, was this limited to the Watchers' "bubble"? What about the complete erasure of the Multiverse operated by the Beyonders before Secret Wars? And speaking of the Multiverse, if the Reckoning War always happens (as the Time Variance Authority states), then it happens in all realities, meaning that every universe is actually 1/10th of its original size.
Finally, there is the question of what lies beyond the Watchers' bubble, in that immense toxic universal wasteland, besides the Reckoning? The Fantastic Four are known as the explorers of the unknown, so it will probably be up to them to expose the secrets of Marvel's hidden universe in Reckoning War.