Secret Wars II #4

Secret Wars II #4 (1985)
by Jim Shooter & Al Milgrom

This is an important issue for my retrospective. First of all it’s where it crosses over with Dazzler, and it’s where the quality of the miniseries takes a serious nosedive.
Yes. The issues I reviewed before this one?
THOSE WERE THE GOOD ONES.

We begin with the Beyonder being done with a hookup with a random socialite. Apparently he’s SO good in bed that she’s immediately smitten.

The Beyonder’s love for gadgets has extended to filling his car with random junk, including a tape recorder where he’s narrating his exploits (???) as he makes it fly like a jet.

The Beyonder has been busy with his tie-ins. In one of the most enduring ramifications of Secret Wars II, he’s the one responsible for turning a random elf into Kurse, a somewhat regular Thor villain.
There is a footnote to this which is incorrect: it gives a reference to Thor #247, but Kurse showed up in Thor #347.
For a Jim Shooter story there are several incorrect footnotes in this.

I will do a quick run-up of the various tie-ins when the series is over; the Beyonder quickly references some of the books where he’s going to show up, including Rom of all things.

But he references other characters he’s interested in, like Silver Surfer, Captain America or Ronald Reagan (WTF!?).

I mentioned the Beyonder is doing this while flying his car, which leads to a rather goofy scene.

If this was the innocent Blond Beyonder it would’ve been relatively fun, but we’re in full dumb territory now.
WTF is this, Looney Tunes!? No, scratch that, this isn’t funny in the slightest.

Remember when the first issues gave us a glimpse into the Beyonder’s alien mind and used his presence to talk about the nature of being human?
Now it’s just a juvenile power fantasy. I’ve said it before, but Shooter was a teenager when he wrote Legion of Super-Heroes and 34 when he wrote this, and you’d swear it was the other way around.

The Beyonder has decided that he needs to learn about love, so he decided to drop at the Molecule Man’s house and ask him.

Rarely have I seen so much text used to say so little.

Give me Blond Beyonder over this any day of the week.

The Beyonder returns to the socialite from the beginning of the story, who has killed herself.

…because nobody is able to  her like the Beyonder.
Between this and the AWFUL Dazzler graphic novel, am I reading too much into this or does Jim Shooter have serious issues with women!?

Considering that, be thankful he didn’t have the Beyonder take a female form because I’m sure he would’ve written the Beyonder EVEN WORSE.

This is where the Beyonder decides he’s going to love Dazzler. But why?
Is it because he remembers meeting her in the first issue, perhaps?
Nope, it’s completely random!!!

Also, Dazzler is “perhaps the most powerful mutant”.

We never see the socialite again, by the way.

So the Beyonder decides to kidnap Dazzler from her plot.

Mercifully he picks her from her Archie Goodwin run, so she fights back. If she was from the Shooter run, she might’ve gone along with it just fine.

After giving her a vision of his origins, the Beyonder explains that he decided to be in love with Dazzler. At least she’s given the option to know him a little first.

Beyonder, buddy, you might basically be God but she didn’t mean “know you” in the biblical sense.

Yeah I can’t imagine why she can’t stand him.

At least the Beyonder DOES recall meeting Dazzler before, but… man those walls of text are getting really out of hand, isn’t it?

To be fair there IS something interesting and even romantic in the idea of an all-powerful god falling for a human, and the Beyonder’s little speech about her being more important to him than the universe is written competently.

There WOULD be a good story here, if only Shooter managed to avoid his excesses.

The Beyonder at least TRIES to limit himself…

…to only one more tie-in, with Alpha Flight this time.

This series has a MAJOR problem with superheroes attacking the Beyonder for no reason whatsoever, but Alpha Flight has a minor excuse: they just finished a fight with supervillains, and since they don’t know anything about the Beyonder they assume he’s one of them.

The fight has a very blatant error: at this point in their history, when Aurora and Northstar touch it should CANCEL their powers, not enhance them!!!

The Beyonder takes the opportunity to save Talisman from Shaman’s medicine bag (something that makes sense only if you’re reading the John Byrne run on Alpha Flight, which you should).
Another footnote error: Talisman was trapped in Alpha Flight #27, NOT #22.

ALL OF THIS was so that the Beyonder could take a ring from Shaman’s pouch as a gift for Dazzler. Now, if you’re not familiar with Alpha Flight… that pouch is kind of an Eldritch abomination that contains as much magical artifact as Doctor Strange’s closet.
So you might expect this to be an extremely powerful magic ring, but… nope, that’s just a ring.

It’s also a completely useless diversion, because Dazzler doesn’t even want the ring!!!

So the Beyonder decides to give her a gift she might actually want: a career.

Actually that’s a common misconception, Dazzler.
The Beyonder’s problem as a character is not that he’s too powerful.
It’s that he’s a freaking idiot.

Speaking of idiots: the Avengers show up to fight the Beyonder!

They are surprisingly effective, and I have to ask… at the time, was this version of the Beyonder already despised enough that the readers were rooting for him to lose?

Dazzler even has to intervene to stop them from murdering the Beyonder!!!

The cover scene makes it into the story, but it’s drawn far worse.

If the Avengers seemed to act out of character… it’s because these were not the REAL Avengers, but just duplicates conjured up by the Beyonder.
She might have been picked up from the Archie Goodwin run, but Dazzler is still being written by Jim Shooter so she reverts to be a complete moron like she used to be.
Because apparently the way to a woman’s heart is pretending to be in danger!

In what is perhaps the only well-penciled scene in the entire miniseries, the Beyonder decides to share half of his power with Dazzler.

This scene deserves to be in a better comic.

However Dazzler doesn’t really like the experience and rejects the Beyonder, who gets all possessive.

She also renounces her half of the Beyonder’s power, and since she does this while she’s flying, she then plummets to her death.

The Beyonder takes her rejection just about as you’d expect.

But this is the original Beyonder we’re talking about, so a narration box is all he needs to fix the damages and resurrect Dazzler.

He’s also forced Dazzler to love him, but he has learned his lesson and releases her from his control.

Or so he says, because he will STILL show up in the Dazzler series.

I sure wish I could forget this story too.

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Historical significance: 3/10
All things considered, not as important as it could’ve been. The fact the Beyonder was in love with her is only a factor in ONE issue of Dazzler, and it’s not like he really learns anything. Even his interaction with Alpha Flight doesn’t turn into anything.

Silver Age-ness: 10/10
That interaction with the jet pilot is peak Silver Age-ness on the Marvel scale.

Does it stand the test of time? 2/10
I’m probably being too generous. But the scene where the Beyonder shares his power and Dazzler’s refusal to go along with his shenanigans are at least salvageable.
The rest of it though, is a real mess. The attempt to connect the miniseries with the tie-ins doesn’t really work, having the fake Avengers instead of the real deal is a cheap trick, and there’s a surprising amount of errors in the footnotes. Despite what it looks like this story DOES have an editor, namely Bob Budiansky, but I suppose he might have been a bit intimated by the larger-than-life Jim Shooter a bit.
But let’s talk about the story’s exploration of the Beyonder, or namely how it misses the mark.
The whole reason why he doesn’t pursue the socialite is that her love is “transactional”: she wants something in return for the relationship. The Beyonder runs into exactly the same problem when he pursues Dazzler: in return for his love, he wants to understand how humans feel.
The built-in morale is that he’s guilty of exactly the same thing he accused the socialite of, but bizarrely the story doesn’t go that way and the Beyonder seems to learn the wrong lesson (assuming he learns anything).
His alien way of thinking is mostly gone, but there is one minor aspect that lingers: I would’ve liked if Dazzler pointed out that you can’t simply wake up and decide you love someone just like that.
Speaking of Dazzler, she wasn’t as bad as I feared. She rejects the Beyonder’s very pushy and stalker-y behavior, but once she understand he’s misguided and not actively malicious she at least tries to understand how things are going.
Then it all falls flat when she catches feelings for him anyway, just because he pretended he was being hurt by the fake Avengers. Good thing that this is the last time Jim Shooter gets to write her!
And, uhm, the less we talk about the woman killing herself because nobody has sex like the Beyonder, the better.