Jonathan Hickman's Secret Wars started from the point where all the universes were destroyed, after Earth's heroes failed utterly to prevent this. Doom was able to destroy the Beyonders, because Doom is goal-oriented like that, and made himself god of a single surviving world, cobbled from pieces of those destroyed universes. Like Crisis on the Infinite Earths, but a lot less stuff salvaged, and much more messily pieced together.
Yes, even messier than Hawkman's continuity.
Marvel decided to lean into this by at least temporarily canceling all their ongoing titles. In their place, we got a bunch of four-issue mini-series, set in different zones of Doom's world. This is probably the oddest of those, considering it's playing off the early Nineties X-Men cartoon, of all things. Well, sort of. Sims and Bowers bring in characters that were not part of that cartoon as part of what is a weird story.
The X-Men get an invite to a rehabilitation clinic supposedly helping violent mutants set aside their destructive and self-destructive impulses. A clinic run by Cassandra Nova, who in this reality is a clone body of Xavier's (made by Apocalypse, I do not remember that plotline) that is possessed by the Shadow King. Nova has some weird plan to smooth out the X-Men's rough edges and neuroses, to make them into bland, pleasant sorts, presented as making them "BSP Approved", meaning Broadcasting Standards and Practices.
Yeah, I don't know. It feels like meta-commentary, but it isn't like the cartoon wasn't in some ways nerfed by the BSP back in the day. We didn't see Wolverine violently carving people up, just robots. Same for Bishop and Cable shooting things with their giant firearms. Nor was their much suggestion anybody was getting any, but Nova apparently felt there was just too much tension and innuendo going on between Gambit and Rogue. And this is all part of a plan to make sure Robert Kelly (who is Doom's "baron" in this sector) gets killed by some Frankensteined mega-Sentinel, so Nova can take his place. It doesn't work, thanks to an assist from a bizarre X-Force squad. Having Bishop and Cable on the same team seems like it would violate some limit on the number of firearms you can carry.
I think this comic must have been released digitally first, because some of the panel layouts are just bizarre if it was designed for print. Not at all what Koblish's layouts look like on anything else I've seen of his, or anything else I've seen that Bowers and Sims wrote. Pages with lots of empty black space and only one or two panels (like the page up above). I assume those were meant to read like you swipe and the next panel pops up, closer to still in an animated feature. There are voice balloons where Nova says one thing, and there's a big red "X" stenciled over it and a little note saying it's inappropriate, with different, less suggestive in another balloon nearby. That said, the psychic battle between Xavier and Nova has some neat bits in it, with Xavier's consciousness being scattered into a bunch of little orbs that look very freaked out. I don't buy the Shadow King, Xavier body or no, can overcome the Phoenix, though.
As far as the four Secret Wars' mini-series I've actually read, I'd probably rank this third, although I haven't re-read Master of Kung-Fu in a while.
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