ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches a history of how Marvel approached the continuity side of its world-building from the 1980s through today. Beginning with 1984’s Secret Wars miniseries, Marvel has created numerous line-wide “event” stories that bring together all of the publisher’s greatest heroes to fight some kind of large-scale threat. At the same time as these crossovers took off, Marvel also came to embrace a greater amount of multiplicity in its story world, creating and integrating various parallel universes as part of a larger multiversal cosmology. These alternate worlds would include the “Heroes Reborn” initiative and the Ultimate line of comics, the latter of which would be integrated into Marvel continuity in a 2015 event series that was also named Secret Wars. Following this crossover, Marvel’s multiverse was recreated in a way that allowed for the integration of the entire history of Marvel continuity into a unified imaginary world.
