After the success of Marvel's first big crossover event, Secret Wars, Jim Shooter planned an even bigger sequel for the following year. Unlike the first one, which affects several comics but is otherwise fairly self-contained, Secret Wars II contains tie-in issues in nearly every Marvel comic at the time, encouraging the reader to collect them all. I blatantly ignored this, only reading the main series, collected in this volume, and the tie-ins in Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants, Alpha Flight, Dazzler, and New Defenders.
Not only is Secret Wars II huge and sprawling, it's also terrible.
The premise is that the omnipotent cosmic being the Beyonder came to Earth and took human form. The first couple issues consist of him wandering around and pointing at things while saying things like "Why is food?" while Spider-Man teaches him how to poop. Then, after briefly becoming a gangster and then mind controlling the whole universe until he gets bored, the Beyonder decides he needs to fall in love and stalks Dazzler until she tells him to leave her alone, after which he becomes a New Age self-help guru in Hawaii.
In the later issues, the Beyonder decides, for reasons not entirely clear, to destroy the entire universe, bringing him into conflict with all of Earth's superheroes as well as Mephisto.
I think Jim Shooter was trying to be philosophical, asking questions about identity, desire, meaning, etc. But it all comes off very juvenile and shallow.
The only enjoyable issue was #5, in which the Beyonder goes on a road trip with a suicidal teenaged mutant runaway named Boom-Boom. If that was the whole series, perhaps it could have been good, but it's just a brief break in an otherwise joyless slog.
This is the nadir of comic events and it makes the entire medium feel less enjoyable.