By Eric S Brown
Never let it be said that Marvel doesn’t like to milk an event for all the money that can be made from it. Often with popular events such as the X men’s Inferno, Daredevil’s Devil’s Reign, etc., the company will release a prequel book supposedly containing key issues that lead up to it. Secret Wars: Prelude is one of these collected trades. It is two hundred and forty pages of comic fun that set the stage of the 2015 event Secret Wars.
Many longtime Marvel readers won’t benefit from picking up a copy of this trade at all as a good number of stories collected within it are classics that they have likely already read, such as issues ten through twelve of the original Secret Wars and Fantastic Four # 611. The rest of the book is fleshed out by issue one through three of the 2013 New Avengers’s run which are far from the best stories to come out of the “house of ideas” as Stan Lee used to call Marvel along with two issues from Marvel’s Ultimate Universe- Ultimate Comics # 4 and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man # 1.
At a cover price of $34.99, most are better off just skipping this particular trade paperback and diving directly in the collected story of the 2015 Secret Wars event itself. Nothing in the book is so vital that it can’t be skipped. Still, for those who are completists or with money to burn, Secret Wars: Prelude does provide a means of killing an afternoon by spending it in the history of the Marvel Universe.
