Despite being a series that pulls from Marvel’s entire existence, Secret Wars is meant to be accessible to just about everyone from beginning to end. In his eyes, it’s a movie — albeit, a six-month-long one — that Marvel’s writers have made sure old and new readers can dive into and enjoy. The comparison is probably as crazy as it is apt. Marvel currently rules the roost when it comes to comic book films, and with Age of Ultron slated to bring in perhaps the biggest opening weekend draw of all time , any chance to bring in new fans means bringing in big money. That means writing massive stories that might one day be even more massive movies. The trick — and it’s not going to be easy — is managing to tell a good story. I spoke with Alonso about how Marvel could possibly pull this feat off.

Longtime fans will recognize the Secret Wars name from the original miniseries Marvel released back in 1984 . The premise was similar; take all your major characters and make them fight one another. It was the first, if not the most important, crossover event of its kind, and it paved the way to the kind of franchise-smashing events that Marvel and DC are now trying to pull off at the movies. This year, things are getting much crazier, with the entire Marvel multiverse at stake.

Marvel is ready to blow up its entire universe. Whose idea was this, and why is it happening?

This event has been years in the making, and it started with an idea that Jonathan had prior to writing The Avengers [in 2009]. We saw it as an opportunity to transform the Marvel universe in a way that quite frankly we've never done before. So, all of our ships, so to speak, would be pointed in one direction — towards this event.

So essentially you're blowing out the original 1984 Secret Wars concept. Like you said, this is bigger than anything that's happened before.

Yeah, it is. I mean, the long and short of it is that this event shares a title and shares some cosmetic similarities to the original Secret Wars, most notably this place called Battleworld. But it's an entirely new story and an entirely different story, set up by completely different inciting events. And what it does to the Marvel universe is take the various universes and smash them together, making a new world. A new world that's divided into new regions that's governed in a very new way. And the first question is: what characters and what portions of the Marvel universe, and the Ultimate universe, as an example, survived and made it to this world. So what you have is a new world, a new Marvel universe that's comprised of these new and frequently dangerous regions populated by those characters we cherry picked to be survivors on the world. [It’s] about the dynamic on that world.

There's been a lot of talk about how this may or may not be a reboot. My understanding is this is effectively changing the fabric of that multiverse but not necessarily the characters. Is that right?

Yeah, I'd say that’s what this is. It's ultimately for the readers to decide what they're seeing. What I will say is that we don't believe our continuity or our universe is broken. We don't believe it needs to be fixed. And I think that this story will bear that out. We have a tremendous opportunity here to transform the Marvel universe in a way that makes for incredible stories down the road, for the next 10, 20 years worth of publishing. This is an instance where we're going to be bringing into the Marvel universe new characters, new regions, new concepts, and, in certain cases replacing, out of necessity, some pieces that were on the board. And it's going to make this a lively debate on the internet and beyond.

A movie in comic book form

I do want to stress one thing here: that this is structured to be a very accessible story to anyone who's not read a comic book before. Jonathan and Esad [Ribic]'s story is structured in a way that should be completely understandable to anyone who went to see, say, The Avengers movies. [It] begins clean, and moves upwards cinematically, and readers will understand who the players are, what the inciting incident is, [and] the stakes. There will, of course, be questions that propel them through the story. That's what a good story should always do. But the story does come to a sense of full resolution, and that story in and of itself should be an incentive for people to want to know more and read the other titles — the Spider-Man titles, the X-Men titles — and see what's going on in them.

I want to make it very clear, nothing in that series or during the event, is inconsequential. Nothing there is a "What If?" story, or an alternate reality story. There is only one reality, and it is Battleworld. That is the only reality. And out of that, everything that was part of it, every single book needs to bring something onto the table that will last and exist and inform the Marvel universe moving forward. That could be a character or characters, good guy or bad guy. It could be a new region. It could be a new artifact of great power or what have you. It could be almost anything. But every single series that we're doing is a piece of the Marvel universe going forward.

So from May on, it'll be broken up into three sub-stories. You have "Last Days" beginning and ending next month, then you have "Battleworld" and "War Zones" running from May to November. How do those all work?

Let me start at the beginning. All of our creators, all of our writers and artists, knew Secret Wars was coming. One of the options we made available to people was that perhaps you think it will be interesting to show the last days of your character before this event, before the — pardon my French — shit hits the fan. What would they do in their "last days?" Tell us that story. So it allows for them to tell a smaller story in the Marvel universe as it exists right now. And certain titles like Ms. Marvel and Black Widow, they're a little smaller scale, they opted to take that route. Those individual writers said, "You know, I think it's fascinating to see how Kamala Khan reacts to this. She's a new superhero. She lives in Jersey City, and this event happens. What does she do?" So they elected to do that, and those are the "Last Days" stories. It's the last days of those characters before the event.

What would Ms. Marvel do at the end of the world?

The next category is the "Battleworld" titles, and they're titles that are about the [newly created] world, but they're more closely associated with the core series, Secret Wars. They're about the world as a whole. So they cover an aspect of that world, whether it's the way that world is policed, or governed. A border dispute between two zones, like Age of Ultron versus Marvel Zombies would be an example of that. It doesn't sound like a recipe for hugs and kisses, does it? So what happens in that scenario. I kind of look at that as being a deep dive into Secret Wars. You can see the politics of that world, the infrastructure of that world, all wrapped up, of course, in the story.

The "Warzone" titles are about a single domain, and they stand alone. You needn't read Secret Wars to appreciate them. You can feasibly not read Jonathan and Esad's core series and still get what's going on. An example of that is The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows. If you've seen the tease, Spider-Man and MJ are back and married and everything's rosy. How the hell did that happen? Is that a good thing? What's going to happen? Those stories are [about] picking moments of our biggest and brightest — and in some cases most controversial — stories, and having some fun with our core characters.