Today, Marvel’s Secret Wars is a beloved classic due to it being one of the earliest mega-crossovers in comics. However, it may be a shock for modern readers to discover that the event was created with the main intention of promoting an upcoming toyline. In doing so, then editor-in-chief of Marvel, Jim Shooter, would inadvertently change the comic book industry forever.
In the early ’80s despite being one of the biggest comic publishers in the world, Marvel was still a relatively small company with limited appeal to mainstream audiences. With the recent massive success of the Kenner Star Wars action figures, Marvel was approached by toy company Mattel to create a competing toy-line out of their heroes. Jim Shooter, Marvel’s editor-in-chief at the time, saw this as a great opportunity to draw profits and gain a more wide-spread fan base amongst children. To help promote the upcoming toyline, Shooter decided he could do so using the comics themselves by constructing a major event storyline to go along with it.
In order to find a name for this upcoming event comic, Mattel would hold numerous focus groups intending to gather data on what children liked. The results found boys in the groups reacted excitedly to the words “secret” and “wars.” Having obtained this information, “Secret Wars” was chosen to be the title for this new toy promotion comic. With the new title of the event now decided, writers would begin to drop breadcrumbs within their stories leading up to Secret Wars.
In the months before the release of the Secret Wars storyline, comic writers would begin to change the status quo of their books to encourage interest in the upcoming event. The best example of this took place in certain panels of The Amazing Spider-Man 252, where we see the web-head escaping from a weird structure in Central Park while wearing a new a new black Spider suit. The Spider-Man issue itself did little to explain this change, stating that readers would have to pick up Secret Wars to see why this happened. This is notable because the black suit Spider-Man would also be made into a toy for the line and would become an iconic staple of the character’s history.
With all these pieces now in place, the comic just needed to be written, which was done by none other than Jim Shooter himself. In Secret Wars, all of Marvel’s greatest heroes, such as Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the X-men, were transported to a bizarre planet by a cosmic being known as the Beyonder. The Beyonder would do the same to their evil villains, who were led by Doctor Doom. The Beyonder instructed the two groups to destroy their enemies in order to achieve their grandest desires. Without spoiling anything further, Secret Wars would go on to be iconic in both the toy and comic mediums.
Following the success of Secret Wars, both Marvel and DC would attempt to replicate its impact by creating more continuity-shaking events on a yearly basis; a practice that still happens today. Following its success, Jim Shooter would also attempt a similar tactic later on by creating comics to promote both the Transformer and GI Joe toys in the ‘80s. Considering the giant influence Secret Wars had on the comic medium, it’s still shocking to realize it was all done to sell toys.