Comics fandom has known since last October’s New York Comic Con that Marvel’s big crossover event for 2015 will be called Secret Wars. Now Marvel has finally revealed what that will entail, and, like any good summer comics event, it’ll have a lasting impact on the Marvel Universe. But this one won’t just shake up who’s on what teams. The upcoming Secret Wars storyline will overhaul the Marvel Universe on a scale reminiscent of DC’s 80s epic Crisis on Infinite Earths.

The name “Secret Wars” is hardly new, and it harkens back to the 80s as well. The original Secret Wars was a 12-issue story that pulled characters together from across the Marvel Universe to, well, primarily sell toys – Mattel wanted a cohesive theme and storyline for their Marvel action figure series. The story introduced a godlike being called the Beyonder who snatched up Earth’s greatest heroes and villains and pitted them against each other. It’s still a fondly-remembered story (less so its sequel, Secret Wars II) and not a bad place to mine for a little nostalgia.

Ironically, this Secret Wars seems designed to sell not toys but comic books. Comic book sales today are a fraction of what they were in the 80s. Marvel makes far more money from movies and TV shows, and the comic books themselves have become almost an auxiliary medium. Many would-be readers are put off by the decades of convoluted backstory behind the original versions of their favorite movie characters. Marvel addressed this back in the 00s with the Ultimate Universe, a relaunch of their most popular characters that ran alongside but separate from the ongoing books, but now even that has its own complicated history.

So like DC Comics in the 80s did with Crisis on Infinite Earths, Marvel is using Secret Wars to overhaul and simplify things in a way that they hope will be welcoming to new readers without alienating the old ones. The Ultimate Universe has originated lots of new ideas that have become familiar through the movies and other press – like a Nick Fury who’s less David Hasselhoff and more Samuel L. Jackson, and Miles Morales, Peter Parker’s Black Hispanic replacement as Spider-Man – and Secret Wars is a chance to bring them into the main Marvel Universe (Earth-616 to the hardcore nerds). But it won’t just be Ultimates-meets-616. Marvel promises to bring together a Gwen Stacy who became Spider-Woman, the cyberpunk future of the 90s 2099 stories, the Age of Apocalypse, and every other alternate-reality storyline and cast of characters Marvel has ever done.

And after the dust clears over the wreckage of the Marvel multiverse, the result should be a new universe that’s familiar enough for people who came to know Iron Man or Captain America or even Spider-Man through the movies but were too intimidated by decades of narrative hubris to ever read them at their source. People who have heard news stories about the female Thor or the Muslim Ms. Marvel or “Spider-Gwen” can pick those up as well.

But the real question is: Can Peter Parker go back to being married to Mary Jane already?