Why the Marvel Multiverse Is Dying: How Across the Spider-Verse Echoes Hickman's Road to Secret Wars

The Multiverse is dying. Things aren't looking good, and everything seems fated to end in a multitude of incursions and multiversal wars that destroy timelines across the Marvel Universe.

Since the Multiverse was first opened up in Loki season 1, we've seen project after project embrace it. By the time Across the Spider-Verse arrived in June 2023, it had been explored in What If, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, No Way Home, Morbius, Multiverse of Madness and Across the Spider-Verse itself. I had been rereading Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run, a seminal arc that pulls together a wealth of ideas that all culminate in the 2015 Secret Wars book. With that being where I believe we're eventually headed, I think we have to get used to what it means now.

Miguel O'Hara's mistake in Across the Spider-Verse mirrors Doctor Strange's incursions

To explain this, we have to look at what Across the Spider-Verse tells us. The film spans the Marvel Multiverse, with Miles Morales meeting several different spider people. We discover that Miguel O'Hara was desperate for a family, so he traveled to a universe where a version of him had one and had died. His presence ended up destroying that universe.

Since then, Miguel has done everything within his power to stop non-canon events from destroying other universes. That is why he doesn't want Gwen meeting Miles, and why Jefferson has to die. This is similar to what Doctor Strange touched on in Multiverse of Madness: though he met a variant of Christine, he couldn't be with her because of incursions causing the universes to start to come together.

Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers told two stories at once

All of this started in Hickman's Avengers run, which carried over into his New Avengers books. In one book, you had the public facing work the Avengers were doing, which included investigating a group of godlike creatures called the gardeners that had entered the universe. On the other side, you had the secret society of the Illuminati in New Avengers, which only a select few were aware of.

The Illuminati were working to keep things quiet, investigating incursions and destroying any Earth that could come into contact with the 616 universe. This ran from Avengers World through the Infinity storyline, then into Time Runs Out and finally Secret Wars. Ultimately, it streamlined all the universes, bringing Miles Morales into the main one along with other big characters from offshoot books set on different worlds. I definitely recommend picking up Hickman's run if you loved this film as much as I did.

A comic book incursion gives two Earths eight hours to collide

Incursions in the comics are slightly different from how they operate in the MCU, though they share similarities. Just like in Multiverse of Madness, two Earths start to merge into one. They take eight hours to collide, and both Earths and their respective universes are destroyed in the collision.

In 2013's New Avengers issue 1, Black Panther saw the start of this and encountered Black Swan, who came from a colliding Earth. They imprisoned her, and she became a big part of the story. Importantly, incursions can only be witnessed if you step behind an invisible barrier that shows you the incoming collision. It acts like a doorway: everyone on the other side can't see what's going on, whereas once you pass through, you can see the incoming Earth.

The only seeming way to stop an incoming Earth is to destroy it. It's very much a survival of the fittest mentality that saves one world but completely dooms another. With Black Panther being a member of the Illuminati and the invisible wall hiding everything, the incursions didn't get out for quite some time. Once it all came out in Original Sin, it caused a lot of issues, because the Illuminati had been killing billions every time they destroyed a world. They were doing it to save their own, so you could see things from their perspective, though it's a very morally gray area.

The root cause was an Earth dying 25 years early

The incursions began when one of the Earths in the Multiverse exploded 25 years before it was supposed to. This caused what's known as a contraction in the multiversal timeline, which rippled out and knocked the other Earths out of balance, creating a domino effect.

The universe also contains beings known as Builders, who created everything at the dawn of time. They built worlds and sent in beings known as gardeners to evolve life on each planet. If the life worked, they moved on to another world; if it was bad, they destroyed it. The opening of Avengers World centred on this, with a team going against a gardener called Ex Nihilo. That provided a good distraction, letting the Illuminati deal with the incursions while everyone looked the other way.

An incursing Earth usually appeared red, but beings known as the Map Makers turned some blue so they could track them. This also let them identify those who were interfering with the will of the universe and get to the true reason behind all the incursions.

Doctor Doom set off the incursions trying to stop the Beyonders

It turns out the person who set the incursions off was Doctor Doom, because he was trying to stop the plan of the Beyonders. Doom was actually trying to save the entire Multiverse, but instead he ended up destroying it. The Beyonders exist in a space beyond the Multiverse, and like so many omnipotent beings, they saw humans as their playthings. While they were meant to be stewards of the Multiverse from the outside, they had their own nefarious plans: an experiment to destroy the entire Multiverse just to see what happens.

Their plan was to use a bomb in each universe to destroy all the worlds at the same time, and that bomb would be a person. They placed it in a universal constant: Owen Reece, aka the Molecule Man. He first appeared in Fantastic Four issue 20 in 1963 and gained his powers from the Beyonders after an atomic incident. In another plot twist, we learned his origin had been planned by the Beyonders, so it was constant across the Multiverse, giving them a way to control and manipulate every reality.

Molecule Man told Doom that to save the universe, he'd need to kill every version of Molecule Man across the entire Multiverse. That would stop the Beyonders' experiment, and the bomb would never detonate. Molecule Man set this off by killing a version of himself 25 years earlier, but that created the death of a universe, which caused the contractions. It lay dormant until seven years later, when the incursions started. The Beyonders eventually used the deaths of Molecule Men across the Multiverse to track down Doom and his army of Swans, who were carrying out the killings.

This sparked a secret war between the Beyonders and Doom. Their big weakness was that they couldn't travel back in time, because they were stuck living in linear time. Doom used this to defeat them, took their power and created Battleworld.

The Illuminati faced a threat even Thanos couldn't match

All of Doom's plans unfolded without anyone knowing, and the Illuminati needed a way to deal with arguably the biggest threat they'd ever faced. These heroes can fight a Thanos, they can fight a Galactus, they can pull off a Time Heist, but this is kind of beyond them. Destroying an entire world to save their own is something very few are equipped to deal with, unless they become like Oppenheimer, the destroyer of worlds.

During Avengers vs X-Men, Captain America discovered the Illuminati and was furious to learn about Tony's secret dealings. These people had their hands in almost everything since their formation, and the fact that even the Avengers didn't know was a really sore point. To bury the hatchet, Tony invited him into the group, but pretty early on he realised Steve wasn't the right person for the job. The Illuminati are extremely cutthroat because they have to make tough choices.

The Illuminati feel they are best equipped for this because they have someone representing every aspect of Earth: Tony for humans, Doctor Strange for magic, Namor for Atlantis, Black Bolt for the Inhumans, Professor X for mutants and Black Panther for Wakanda. Each would meet in secret when a large threat was on the horizon and decide how to handle it.

Captain America's refusal shattered the Infinity Stones and cost him his memory

Where the rest wanted to destroy the incursing Earth, Steve refused. His biggest flaw is that he refuses to make sacrifices and will do whatever he can to reach a resolution where nobody has to die. That most notably cost the heroes in Infinity War, but it's very much the character's greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

Instead, Steve came up with the idea of using a newly built Infinity Gauntlet to push the other Earth away. It didn't work. The attempt shattered all the Infinity Stones except the Time Gem, which traveled into the future and disappeared, leaving the Avengers looking foolish. I think the MCU could get a similar situation, as its Infinity Stones have been destroyed and can't be used on the main Earth to divert incursions.

With the pushing plan having destroyed the stones, the Illuminati didn't want to attempt anything else that could cause even more damage, so they settled on destroying the incoming Earth. Captain America wasn't pleased, so they wiped his memory. Everything he learned about the Illuminati was gone. Hickman played with this brilliantly: at the start of Avengers World, Steve woke up and told Tony he'd had a bad dream. We got a flash of the Illuminati standing around him, but he couldn't grasp what had happened. If you only read the Avengers book, things might seem pretty cliché, with Steve sent off to recruit Avengers and fight big battles in space. With him distracted, the Illuminati were free to deal with the incursions.

Namor's secret solution and Tony Stark's war room

There are lots of big stories in this run. At one point the Illuminati face a world with a play on the Justice League, and both teams initially want a peaceful resolution, but as the clock ticks down they end up fighting. In another, Namor storms out because the others want to find a way to avoid destroying the other Earth. The eight hours count down to zero, then minus one second, minus two, minus three, and the countdown keeps going. Everyone is confused, wondering whether they got a false positive, whether their instruments are wrong, or whether they had the entire incursion idea wrong from the start. What had actually happened is that Namor had recruited a bunch of supervillains and destroyed the entire Earth.

Steve's memory was restored in Original Sin, and he remembered everything. He confronted Tony directly and beat him up. The problem is that you don't fight Tony Stark in his own home. In his office, his workshop, his war room, Tony launched all his Iron Man suits and evened the odds. It was "such a cool moment that just made my jaw hit the floor when I read it."

The MCU's 838 Illuminati and dreamwalking Doctor Strange

We can easily see how the Illuminati were brought across to the MCU. We finally saw them in the 838 universe in Multiverse of Madness, after a tease in Iron Man 2, where you could glimpse an Illuminati app on Tony Stark's phone. So perhaps the team was formed back then without even the audience knowing. The 838 Illuminati explained the incursions in the MCU, which operate slightly differently, but like their comic counterparts, they used lies and deception to keep the public unaware of the true threats of the Multiverse.

In the main MCU universe, the heroes beat Thanos through time travel. In the 838 universe, Doctor Strange used the Darkhold to dreamwalk across the Multiverse to find a way to defeat Thanos, and in doing so he created the incursions. In the MCU, spending too much time in another reality has an almost magnetic effect, with molecules from each side pulling together to be whole. Where the comics' true cause was Doom trying to stop the death of the Multiverse, the MCU's Multiverse appears to be all over the place, with the TVA, the Council of Kangs and dreamwalking all being factors.

Canon events, fixed points and the blood that ends realities

The What If episode with Strange trying to save Christine is a great example. Her death is described as a fixed point, very similar to a canon event: that variant of Christine had to die to push him on to become Doctor Strange. Throughout the episode, Strange did whatever he could to save her, but this ended up destroying his entire universe.

That seems similar to how things operate in Across the Spider-Verse. Miguel's actions caused a world to be destroyed, and since then he has tried to stop non-canon events, but in doing so he ends up causing them. Gwen saves her father as an affront to his actions, and Miles is desperate to save his dad, which will have a knock-on effect like what we saw with Doom. Blood seems to be the only way to end things in the Marvel Universe. In the 838 universe, the Illuminati had to kill their Strange to stop more incursions, and we later meet a Sinister Strange who caused one as well. These will likely be happening across the Multiverse even though we're unaware of them.

The Multiverse is extremely fragile, and everyone is meddling with it

There are probably millions of incursions happening across the cosmos that the heroes are unable to comprehend. These events might seem different, but they're linked through the same modus operandi. The universes themselves appear extremely unstable, and even the slightest change can destroy them. Stop a canon event, as with Christine or in Across the Spider-Verse, and that reality starts to fall apart. Spend too much time dreamwalking in another reality, and things head towards oblivion. Kill Molecule Man when you shouldn't, and that sets things off too. Basically, doing anything that shouldn't happen in a reality will cause it to implode. "The Multiverse is extremely fragile and frail," and everyone messing around in it is going to cause these realities to fall apart.

You can see why the exiled Kang was so desperate to stop his variants in Quantumania, because they have the potential to destroy reality by meddling so much. When Across the Spider-Verse came out, I suggested the MCU might use Strange as the central figure in all of this, since we learn that across all realities he has been dreamwalking. That echoes the comics, with Molecule Man as the key to the incursions, except that in the MCU as it stood then, the Multiverse's destruction was a result of the Kangs. Either way, once the incursions get rolling, there's no way to stop them, as they keep knocking Earths into other Earths.

In June 2023, I thought we were slowly seeing everything fall into place for it all to play out in Secret Wars. In the comics, things culminate with the timelines being streamlined into a main universe, with some characters pulled across from other realities, which is how Miles got into the 616. With some live action characters appearing in Across the Spider-Verse, I said I'd love to see the Miles from this series cross into the main MCU, which would be a cool way to play on the comics and what came before. At the time, I felt we didn't have long left for the Multiverse and that we would see these world ending events more and more.

Do you think the MCU will follow Hickman's path to Secret Wars, or will canon events and dreamwalking take it somewhere entirely different?