Several years ago, I wrote a Marvel Comics fanfic based on Secret Wars, the miniseries from the eighties, just for the heck of it. You may know that the next Avengers movie after this winter’s Doomsday will be a loose adaptation of this story.
I found a home for it. It’s novella-length—a little over 25,000 words. The original plot from the comic book is the same; I just expanded on it by adding scenes and doing my best to patch holes.
I treated it like a work of my own. The most important element, for me, was to take an inherently outrageous premise—cosmic entity gathering superhumans together to fight each other for the right to see their deepest desires fulfilled—and to find the humanity within it. Knowing the characters helped.
SW was created to sell toys. While there were legitimate character moments throughout the original story, it was a highly commercial enterprise that begat the modern era in comics of “crossover events,” end-of-the-world stories told within many different comic books, involving characters who normally don’t interact with each other.
And yet I still have affection for it, over forty years later. Flaws and all.
Why else would I have written a fanfic of it?
