Comic Book Crossover Events Done Right

WARNING! The post title and the image above should be a dead giveaway, but this rather long-ish opinion piece is aimed at my fellow comic book peeps. If you don't read comics, you might not have any clue of what I'm talking about, and while I'd be thrilled if you read the post, you do run the risk of glazing over at your computer. However, if you do like and/or read comics, read on! You might find this interesting.

I don't follow Robert Kirkman's Invincible, but I have read the first couple of volumes, and found it to be an enjoyable book. It's one of those comics I'd like to get in collected form, but for one reason or another, I haven't done so yet. Anyway, just the other day Kirkman announced a done-in-one Image Universe crossover to come in Invincible #60, and it immediately crystallized for me something I've been thinking about quite a lot, which is this: comic book events have become too unwieldy, too expensive, and most importantly, not satisfying enough.

I read Marvel's Secret Invasion, and after the first couple of issues, found it lacking in meaningful drama. It just felt to me like the storytelling was fractured and all over the place. By the time we got to the now much-discussed last issue, featuring the death of an Avenger, it was done in such a way as to place the reader at a remove, instead of putting the reader in the thick of it with the characters, to the point where not only did I not realize what was happening to said Avenger, when I figured it out, I didn't care. Not good.

I'm having the same problem with DC's Final Crisis. Perhaps this is because I don't follow the DC Universe as closely as I do the Marvel comics, but I know the characters pretty well, and I know the history and have a decent grasp of the current continuity. But I feel like I'm getting story fragments instead of a story.


When I was a teenager and read the granddaddy of all these event series, DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, I understood what was happening. The plot was clear: an unknown force was sweeping across the multiple Earths that made up the DC Universe at the time, and the heroes had to figure out what it was and stop it. At all times, the creative team succeeded in making you feel like you were on the ground level with the heroes, so there was great drama, and to see all those heroes of multiple Earths fighting together against a universe-destroying evil was just fun. Secret Invasion and Final Crisis, in my opinion, were and are missing out on fun.

The original Crisis was self-contained. It didn't spill into every title DC was publishing at the time, and it didn't need 4 or 5 supporting miniseries to make it make sense. These days, standard practice is to have the big summer event effect almost every book being published by either company, creating tight continuity across entire lines of comics.

And that is what's been bugging me. Continuity. There's too much to keep track of, too many important, all-encompassing, earth-shattering, universe-shaking events that "change everything forever!" Or at least until next summer's big event. There's too much of a premium being put on these kind of continuity-laden events by the big two publishers, I think to the detriment of the overall quality and understandability of many individual titles. Example: if you're an old school Avengers fan and you decide to come back to comics, and you pick up New Avengers or Mighty Avengers, you're not going to have any clue what the hell is going on. I'll be honest - I've enjoyed some of the Secret Invasion standalone stories that have been appearing in both Avengers titles, but I couldn't give two bowls of cut-rate cereal about Marvel Boy (who appeared in a Grant Morrison-penned mini-series five or six years ago) and what his role in the overarching Secret Invasion story was supposed to be. And that old-school Avengers fan is going to be completely put off by it as well, because that's not what he expects from an Avengers story. He wants to see Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, The Wasp, Hawkeye, maybe Vision and the Scarlet Witch, fighting some big threat, with some character subplots weaving through the story. I realize big event titles generate sales, and that's why they happen, but I think Secret Invasion, which was essentially an Avengers story, could have happened entirely in the pages of the two Avengers books, which perhaps could have lent it a better sense of cohesiveness.

It's that sense of cohesiveness that made last year's "Sinestro Corps War" story, which weaved through the Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps titles, so successful. Other heroes appeared - Superman, Batman, etc. - but it was a Green Lantern story at its core, and while the story was epic in scope, the fact that it was a Green Lantern story first and foremost was never forgotten.

And it seems that with Invincible #60, Kirkman gets that. Quoting from the Comic Book Resources article:
"...despite a multitude of characters appearing in “Invincible” #60, from Image co-founder properties like Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon and Todd MacFarlane's Spawn, the story itself will spin out of the adventures of Kirkman’s teen hero Mark Grayson. 'It's Invincible's book, so he's very much the focus, and it's his villain that's causing all the trouble,' said Kirkman."
Kirkman also said this:
"I guess to a certain extent, we're trying to say, 'Hey, look at all the cool characters that do occupy the Image Universe,'" he explained. "...it's just fun to get everybody in the spotlight for a little bit in the issue."

In a way, it's kind of a throwback to the '80's, and reminds me of John Byrne's Fantastic Four. If he needed some guest stars for his story, he got some guest stars for his story, and it didn't seem to have any effect on what was happening in the guest stars' books. Example - Fantastic Four #243:
"Everyone vs. Galactus. Need we say more?" Not really. There's Cap and Thor, whacking away at Galactus with the tools of their trade. There's Iron Man, giving him a blast with his repulsor rays. There's Doc Strange and the Wasp, doing their thing. And while this is happening in shared universe, this is a Fantastic Four story, and it really only has any effect on the Fantastic Four. (And it was a helluva story, at that - one of my favorites from when I was a kid.)

Understand that I am not a comic book sentimentalist. I don't long for the comics of the '80's. I want to see comics - superhero comics - continue to evolve, to continue to find new ways of telling stories. But I've come to the conclusion that these "earth-shattering" events, if not handled well, are detrimental to that evolution. It's not that they can't or shouldn't happen, but they need to be well thought out. I think Marvel's Civil War was a rare success on that front, setting up an interesting new status quo for characters to operate in, which writers could hint at in their books, or practically ignore entirely. Two examples where that worked: Ed Brubaker's Captain America, which took advantage of the events of Civil War to introduce a new Cap, and his Daredevil, which, for the most part, did its own thing and continues to do so even through Secret Invasion. (And now that I think of it, Marvel's World War Hulk was also successful on that front; it was important to the story of the Hulk, but it wasn't something that needed to show up in every book across the line, e.g., Hulk did a pretty good job of wrecking New York, but the city was fine over in Spider-Man, where Spidey was having his own problems.)

So with all that in mind, I offer the following suggestion to publishers (and I'm sure they've been waiting for me, and me only, to come forward with an opinion): Titles should be self-contained. If a character crosses over from another book, just make it a guest appearance, rather than something that needs to be addressed as having some kind of impact on continuity. If you're going to do an epic event, take a cue from how the Sinestro storyline played out in Green Lantern. Keep things simple as far as continuity goes. Concentrate on telling good stories in each individual title. I think readers will find that rewarding, and I also think that it will be long-term rewarding for publishers, especially if an approach like the one suggested here makes comics more appealing to potential new fans brought into comic shops by well-made comic book movies like Iron Man and The Dark Knight.

If you have any thoughts on this, please leave comment below.

-EB