Where to Start with Jonathan Hickman
Jonathan Hickman thinks bigger than almost anyone in comics. A former architect and graphic designer who broke into the industry with the self-published The Nightly News in 2006, he quickly became known for meticulously plotted, long-form narratives that treat superhero universes as systems to be understood and then reshaped. His Fantastic Four run reestablished the team as Marvel’s premier explorers. His Avengers and New Avengers runs built a years-long storyline about the death of the multiverse. And his Secret Wars (2015) brought all of it together in a single event that destroyed and rebuilt the entire Marvel Universe. In 2019, he returned to reshape the X-Men with House of X / Powers of X, creating a new status quo that dominated Marvel publishing for five years.
Start here
Secret Wars
Jonathan Hickman · 312 pages · 2015 · Challenging
Themes: cosmic destruction, power and responsibility, legacy, multiverse, Marvel Comics
Start here. Secret Wars is the culmination of everything Jonathan Hickman built during his years at Marvel, a story in which the multiverse collapses and Doctor Doom reassembles the fragments into Battleworld, a patchwork planet where he rules as God Emperor. Reed Richards and a handful of survivors must find a way to challenge Doom’s authority and restore what was lost.
Why Start Here
Hickman’s earlier Marvel work (Fantastic Four, Avengers, New Avengers) feeds into this event, but Secret Wars works on its own terms because its central drama is simple and powerful: Reed Richards versus Doctor Doom, two brilliant men with opposing visions of how to save everything. Hickman strips their rivalry to its essence and delivers a conclusion that is both intellectually satisfying and emotionally resonant.
Esad Ribic’s painted art gives every page a mythic weight. Battleworld is gorgeous and strange, each domain a different genre mashed together, and Ribic renders both quiet character scenes and apocalyptic destruction with equal mastery. This is a book that feels important while you are reading it.
What to Expect
A 312-page trade paperback collecting Secret Wars (2015) #1-9 and Free Comic Book Day 2015 (Secret Wars) #0. The plotting is dense and the cast is large. This is the most challenging recommendation on this list. If you are brand new to Marvel, start with one of the other books on this page first. But if you have some familiarity with the universe and want to see it pushed to its limits, Hickman’s Secret Wars is the most rewarding Marvel event of the past two decades.