Marvel gave Kurt Busiek an ultimate: Write a linewide crossover, or else adapt your own books to fit in with somebody else writing one. He chose to control his own destiny.
The event starts with a one-shot, “Dangerous Planet,” that is mostly about aliens. Skrulls. Shi’Ar. Etc. It starts with Ego losing his frickin’ mind and destroying a bunch of planets.
Meanwhile, a skrull goes to an intergalactic council (which appears to be a kind of United Nations for galactic empires) to complain that Professor Xavier is using a skrull black ops team called Cadre K to protect mutant skrulls from being killed by nonmutant skrulls. This ties into events in the x-verse, and it makes sense: Charles has been trying for decades to get homo sapiens to accept homo superior, and it’s pretty much clear that it’s not gonna happen. So, he goes to space to help the skrull race with the same problem.
Anyway, the skrull government sees this (rightly) as interference–and argues (rightly) that it is just the latest in a long string of interferences. They want sanctions against Earth.
While the council is sitting, Ego the Living Planet attacks. Professor X and his Cadre K save the council leaders, which include Lilandra, and Ego gets shrunk down to person-size. Despite this, the council still decides that Earthlings have to be contained.
So, the collection of galactic empires put a forcefield around Earth to contain it, and hire Ronan to be the prison warden. Not only that, they send a whole bunch of alien criminals to do their time on Earth, including the shrunken Ego the Living Planet–who is starting to grow and shoot off spores.
Ego and the other alien criminals have various interactions in the two-dozen tie-in issues that appear in just about every other ongoing series that comes out while Maximum Security is being published. Those issues are all tagged with the Maximum Security tag, so if you hit that, below, you can find them all.
As it turns out, the Kree had manipulated the whole council vote in order to contain Earth’s heroes so that they could destroy them
Big fights. The Kree’s plan is revealed. The Council ends the prison barrier and we’re back to normal.
In some ways, this series is a lot like Secret Wars II, where the main series told the big story and then the tie-ins filled in the details. But in another important way, this series is different from SWII: It’s a lot better. It’s still not a great series, but it’s good enough.
Just about EVERYONE is in this. It took forever to tag all of them.