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The weirdest thing happened in Marvel last week. The publisher’s landmark Secret Wars event has been delayed repeatedly, but Marvel is moving ahead as scheduled with their full line relauch, giving birth to the All-New, All-Different Marvel Universe. We at Comics Beat are dedicated to praising great comics, and with so many potential winners out there it […]

Marvel has just announced a new Contest of Champions title — a return to the three-issue mini-series of 1982 originally dubbed: Marvel Super Heroes Contest of Champions. The new game on IOS bearing the same name serves as the inspiration of the comic, which includes Maestro (Hulk villain) headlining the cover to the first issue. Al Ewing and Paco Medina are chronicling the adventures of this new team of Champions who have been gathered by the Collector to do battle with each other. Ewing wondered aloud: “Where are the trapped heroes stored when they aren’t fighting?”

Venom and Gamora appear to be locked into a battle with various other characters in the Marvel Universe frozen over in blocks of ice. CNet announced the news — along with the cover to the issue. Contest of Champions will launch in October as part of the All-New, All-Different Marvel Universe. Also featured in the series is Guillotine, a new character created jointly by Marvel and Kabam, the developers of the Champions IOS title. The heroine is powered up via a special sword handed down all the way from the French Revolution.

One of the more obvious teasers run by Marvel in the build up to announce Secret Wars was Dale Keown’s image of Peter David’s Future Imperfect series. Back in 1992, David and George Perez told the tale of a dystopian future where an evil version of the Hulk, known as Maestro, laid waste to the heroes of the Marvel Universe in the Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect mini series. While he was killed in the  series by the Hulk we know, the character has recently appeared in Spider-Man 2099. Today, Hollywood Reporter announced that a new Secret Wars tie-in would revisit the world of the Maestro.

Set to release on June 3, Future Imperfect by Peter David and artist Greg Land will tell a stand alone tale of the Maestro wreaking havoc on Battleworld. David has also promised a big surprise when readers find out who’s leading the charge against this out of control monster, “I will tell you this: there’s a character in the series referred to as ‘the boss,’ a person who oversees the battle against the Maestro. I feel pretty confident in saying that no-one will be able to guess that person’s identity until it’s revealed on the last page.”

An interior page from the book was also displayed and shows a female Red She-Hulk. Though the writer would not say if the character was Betty Ross as in the current Marvel U.

It was also revealed today that the Maestro is officially the big boss of Marvel’s Contest of Champions mobile game. Currently available on iOS and Android the mobile fighter lets you build a team of heroes or villains as you fight through a tournament in the game’s own Battleworld. The game is free to download and actually is one of their more interesting titles for fighting boredom in convention lines.