To put it mildly, Secret Wars II is not exactly the most beloved event in the history of the Marvel Universe. Outside of its extremely '80s take on the Beyonder, it's mostly known for not being as successful as the first Secret Wars and having a truly massive number of tie-ins. While this storyline has been maligned and looked down upon for most of its existence, this epic Marvel crossover was quietly ahead of its time in both content and form.
After Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck's original Secret Wars delivered an action-packed slugfest for the ages, Shooter and Al Milgrom's Secret Wars II upended expectations with a crossover that offered deep ruminations on the nature of humanity, desire, what it truly means to love someone and the effects of trauma. These are largely the same kinds of more mature issues that would become normal fodder for comics like Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins' Watchmen or Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Returns that same year.
Had it come along just a little later or been presented in a different context, Secret Wars II could be mentioned alongside those pieces of superhero canon, or at least as a mainstream response to those revolutionary works. However, the crossover arguably overreached in its ambitions, which contributed to its legacy as a half-remembered strange, bloated failure.
Secret Wars II set its focus squarely on the deeper themes. Several of the main issues and most of its tie-ins had relatively little action, Instead, they focused on discussions of various philosophical concepts as the omnipotent Beyonder tries to learn what it means to be human. While the core of the crossover took place in Shooter and Milgrom's Secret Wars II miniseries, it spilled over into various tie-in titles as well.
The main series follows the Beyonder as he comes to Earth, makes a body, and travels the world, seeking knowledge about what it means to be one of many rather than simply one, to have desires and the importance of desire in spurring humans to achieve, better themselves and to love. Although he learns that he shouldn't use his omnipotence to solve all of his problems, Earth's heroes eventually have to team up with the Silver Surfer and the Molecule Man to stop him from doing that anyway.
The tie-in issues tend to focus on smaller-scale interactions as the Beyonder travels around and encounters various heroes and villains, which usually ends up giving them existential crises. These tend to be the deeper, more introspective parts of Secret Wars II. For instance, Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola's The Incredible Hulk #312 uses a devastating look at Bruce Banner’s abusive childhood to talk about the way traumas can affect us for our entire lives. The X-Men tie-ins took a closer look at the struggles that mutants face, and the Spider-Man tie-ins dealt with Peter Parker's endless financial troubles.
The format that these stories took was also novel for the time. Before this event, crossovers were usually self-contained miniseries with few tie-ins in the line as a whole. Secret Wars II had a central miniseries and then individual issues line-wide tied-in, not unlike DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. While that's a standard way for superhero crossovers to operate today, they didn't really function like that throughout '80s or '90s crossovers like Atlantis Attacks, Age of Apocalypse or Onlsaught.
Between it's novel-for-the-era form and it's lofty aspirations, Secret Wars II is still well worth reading today. With modern collections, including a single-volume omnibus and digital comics, it's never been easier to read this crossover in its entirety, with the notable exceptions of a few licensed titles that participated in it. Where it's massive length and scope was once an impediment, it now simply comes across as one of this story's many ambitions.