The Annual Comic Book Massive Crossover Event

By Kerey McKenna.
Part II of a Series.

Avengers: Infinity War opened to a new box office record this weekend, taking in $250 million domestically and narrowly edging out the previous record holder, Star Wars: The Force Awakes. As Box Office Mojo put it, “Audiences assembled.”

There’s no doubt about it: MASSIVE CROSSOVER EVENTS rake in the cash.

It wasn’t always the case.

In Part I of this series, I explored the concept of the “shared universe” that underlies the crossover event. In this part I’ll give some history of these events themselves, and show how we got to this record-breaking weekend.

What TV and movie producers have been experimenting with since the late 60’s, comic book creators have been doing routinely since the 1940’s, when the Human Torch fought the Submariner.

What's better than a title bout between two characters? A team composed of a bunch of their most popular characters, like the All-Star Game in baseball.

Comic book fans quickly became accustomed to characters from different stories sharing the same fictional universe in a way that was seemingly rare in other mediums. Publishers had characters interact for walk-on cameos, team ups, or fist fights. Unlike in TV and movies, crossovers are logistically very easy for comic book publishers because adding new characters is just ink on paper. As long as a publishing house has the rights to two or more characters, they just have the artist of book A draw in characters from book B. And because a character’s creator wasn’t owed royalties for much of comic publishing history, popular characters could be used throughout a publisher’s line of books to help launch new titles and tell “epic stories.”

By the 1980’s larger crossover events became more and more frequent. By the early aughts it was expected that every year the Big Two publishers DC and Marvel would each feature at least one annual event to get as many characters together as possible. These events would take over many or even the majority of their books for one or several months like Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Infinity Gauntlet, and The House of M, just to name a few.

But translating this concept to the mediums of film and TV has its difficulties because it introduces all the challenges of working with the flesh and blood actors, production staff, and physical logistics of two or more productions. Even a quick walk-on cameo by a character from a different story must be squared away with that actor’s contract, pay requirements, and schedule. Telling a story across the multiple time slots of different series requires the collaboration of all the production teams.

Despite these obstacles, producers wished to build upon brand names, repeat successful formulas, boost the ratings of their series, and hopefully somewhere in there tell great stories. There had been attempts to make comic book crossover projects in the 1980’s: a Supergirl movie spun off from the Christopher Reeve Superman films, a Mighty Thor pilot spinoff from the popular Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV series, but nothing ever stuck. It seemed movie and TV audiences would only put up with these garish comic book characters in fits and bursts, not long enough to sustain the “shared universes” comic book fans had come to know. It wasn’t until Marvel Studios painstakingly set up its 2012 Avengers crossover with four years’ of Easter eggs spread across its Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America franchises, that the crossover event hit blockbuster status on the big screen.

Since then, other companies have been trying to ride Marvel’s coattails (now Disney/Marvel) or copy its formula with varying degrees of success.

Sony has a sort of joint custody agreement with Disney/Marvel for the use of Spider-man and is basically leasing space in the Marvel universe after it failed to launch a fully self-sustaining Spider-man franchise of its own.

20th Century Fox, the other inheritor to Marvel IP characters, had been pushing its licensing agreement as far as possible to maintain films (The X-Men series and Deadpool) and TV projects (Gifted, Legion, and New Mutants) in the shared universe based on mutants. At the time of this writing, with Marvel’s parent company Disney purchasing 20th Century Fox, it's unclear if these stories or future projects will also be folded into the established Disney/Marvel Universe.

Their “Distinguished Competition,” DC Comics (the comic publishing subsidiary over at Warner Brothers) is undergoing drastic course correction after is superhero projects as planned out by Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan failed to soar (with the notable exception of Wonder Woman). Although things aren’t all bad for DC/Warner Brothers on the Crossover front. By building a shared universe for some of their TV series (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow, currently all airing on their network, The CW), crossovers between two or all of the shows have gone over pretty well with their fans, becoming regular events as they have been in the comics.

But back in the world of comics where all these colorful characters sprang from, things might not be going so well. I’ll address the phenomenon of “Event Fatigue” in Part III of this series.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

The Annual Comic Book Massive Crossover Event

By Kerey McKenna.
Part I of a Series.

In 2008, patient moviegoers who waited until after the credits rolled on the new superhero action comedy Iron Man were rewarded with a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson in an eye patch insinuating that he wanted to recruit Tony Stark into something called the “Avengers Initiative.”

It was a nice little Easter egg for comic book fans, a character they would know as Nick Fury, head of the fictional SHIELD intelligence/military organization, played by an actor wider audiences would recognize, seemingly joking, “Hey, maybe someday they’ll be a team of these superhero people.”

The writers could have left it as a nice little joke. Comic book fans were used to seeing these dropped into those rare comic book movies we got “back then.” Yeah sure Val Kilmer’s Batman might name drop Superman’s Metropolis, but nobody really expected them to meet up in a movie like they would in a comic book or a Saturday morning cartoon.

But then, in that same watershed year of 2008, Tony Stark had a cameo at the end of the Incredible Hulk film, dropping hints that “something” was being built.

These scenes turned out not to be little jokes for comic book fans, but promises. This time Marvel had creative control and a knack for creating films that kept audiences coming back for more. Each Marvel Movie was a piece of a shared universe building to a big crossover event. And after four years of blockbuster hits, that promise was kept with Avengers.

Marvel and its new parent company Disney had seemingly pulled off the impossible, not only launching and sustaining a string of hits that weren’t ashamed to be comic book movies, but translating another comic book institution to the big screen...THE MASSIVE CROSSOVER EVENT.

All signs indicate that Disney and Marvel are set to break box office records again with the next installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Infinity War. This latest “event” will feature an ensemble cast of Marvel heroes facing off against intergalactic tyrant Thanos as he seeks to collect the Infinity Gems, a collection of Marvel artifacts featured as MacGuffins in previous Marvel films, which, if collected, will grant control over the forces of reality.

Regardless of whether Thanos succeeds or fails, it’s clear that Disney’s own collection of powerful artifacts—its string of blockbuster superhero movies—has granted it control over the forces of cinematic reality.

To mark this weekend’s release of Infinity War, I want to delve into the concepts of shared universes and crossover events more deeply. In this part, I’ll explain what I mean by a shared universe. In Part II, I’ll cover the history of shared universes in movies, comics, and TV, and then in Part III, I’ll deal with the phenomenon of EVENT FATIGUE and touch on the future of crossover events.

What is a Shared Universe?

You and I, dear readers, are part of reality and thus we share one universe. Even as our individual biographies and outlooks differ we ultimately share certain commonalities. But when we read fiction, more often than not we are peering into separate universes, each with its own established themes, characters, and rules. To preserve genre conventions and authorial intent, the characters of a Jane Austen novel you finished last week aren’t going to wander into the courtroom of your John Grisham legal thriller you are thumbing through today. The exception that proves the rule however is the shared universe, when the book you read today, offers a different story and perspective set in the same world as the book you read last week.

A shared universe is when a creator or creators establish that fictional characters of separate stories inhabit the same world. This is different than simply sequels which follow or connect narratives from the same group of characters into what is hopefully a larger narrative. For example Agatha Christie wrote many stories about clever detectives solving murders involving eccentric affluent suspects in opulent settings like country manors or resorts in exotic locales. While some of her books follow the same characters like Ms. Marple or Hercule Poirot at different points in their respective lives, other books establish that all these detectives are in the same world. They have overlapping social circles with common acquaintances and even meet from time to time. And it could be argued that these multiple perspectives give a certain verisimilitude to her fictional world; it establishes that the world she created is not centered around an English spinster or an OCD Belgian, they are just two (of many) windows into a wider word.

A Shared Universe might be fairly simple way for one prose author to connect narratives that aren’t direct sequels, since they can drop names, allusions or even cameos of characters from previous work. Stephen King has been quite fond of this over the course of his career, featuring everything from casual allusions to shared landmarks like the Overlook Hotel or Shawshank Prison to his Dark Tower Saga, outright stating many of the supernatural elements in other works are linked to the same set of interdimensional beings intersecting with different parallel realities.

Coming up in Part II: The Shared Universe in comics, movies, and TV.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Be True to Your School

The Woods.
Written by James Tynion IV, Art by Michael Dialynas and Jason Gonzalez.
Comic Series Review by Kerey McKenna.

Although the young adult survival horror comic, The Woods, has been on my radar since its premiere, I had never gotten around to reading it. But with March’s release of the last installment, I finally downloaded and read the first volume, then the next, and the next, eventually binge reading all 9 of graphic novel trade editions in one weekend. Despite its sometimes disturbing imagery and emotional gut punches, I felt it was a journey that I—like the protagonists—had to complete.

The Woods is the story of Bay Point Preparatory High School in modern day Wisconsin. Unexpectedly, the school building, faculty, staff, and over 400 students are mysteriously teleported to a dense primordial jungle under an alien sky.

The series follows a band of six seniors as they rise to meet the challenge while wrestling with the same internal and interpersonal struggles that defined their lives back on Earth. But now they have to do it while running from lime green alien bears and other monstrosities lurking in the alien jungle.

The six seniors are:

Maria Ramirez: The ambitious (many would say overly ambitions) student body president that saw her position as the first step on the long path to the White House someday. It’s her duty (at least in her own mind) to step up to this new challenge as her fellow students (and some of the adults) are paralyzed with shock and fear. But will her headstrong nature turn off more potential allies and supporters than she can afford?

Sanami Ota: Captain of the field hockey team and daughter of a troubled home. Fortunately her parents are celebrities in the survivalist/doomsday prepper community, so even if they didn’t provide her a stable home life, she is well-instructed in wilderness survival skills.

Karen Jacobs: Sanami’s field hockey teammate and best friend. With her athleticism, grades, good looks and interpersonal skills she could probably do whatever she wants with her life. If only she could figure out what she wants to do.

Calder McCreedy: The school reprobate that was one more grand prank or one more confiscated pocket knife away from expulsion. His devil may care attitude and familiarity with knives could be keys to surviving in the forest, and an A+ paper on the tactics of Hannibal sacking Rome hint that there are hidden depths to this juvenile delinquent.

Benjamin Stone: Speaking of hidden depths, still waters run deep in linebacker Benjamin. The literal big man on campus, this well-liked gentle giant could probably get whatever he wanted in High School life. If only he had the courage to speak up about what his heart’s desire is.

Isaac Andrews: The exuberant, empathetic, and twee Isaac is the heart of the group that will try to make the best out of a rough situation. He adopts an ugly-cute monkey/bat creature from the forest, dubs him “Doctor Robot,” and in turn this strange alien creature becomes the team mascot. Isaac wants to see the good in others, like his best friend and crush...

Adrian Roth: Bespectacled, thin as a rail, book smart, and misanthropic he’s the walking personification of teenagers everywhere who went through a Nietzsche phase. Upon arriving on the mysterious world he feels an uncanny kinship with the place and gathers the others in an audacious plan to strike into the wilderness on their own and find answers to the event and maybe even a way home. But is his daring initiative his own or is this strange place getting into his head?

The Woods is a wonderful campfire tale of survival horror and the trials and travails of children forced to grow up in a harsh world. When I was a young reader, wilderness survival tales like Hatchet, Lord of the Flies, and Island of the Blue Dolphin were the reading of empowered children before teenage rebels against dystopia started a revolution in the genre.

The artwork is excellent. From the expressive faces and body language, the use of color to contrast the earth with the strange neon alien jungle, and the creative creature designs and cohesive action scenes, the art team more than does its job selling this story.

On the writing front the dialogue carries the day with no extraneous narration. The story reminds me of the early seasons of the TV series Lost, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s about a group forced to band together to survive, a supernatural/possibly sentient setting, frequent flashbacks to slow feed new information about the protagonists’ back stories, and a lot of conflict based around what these people need to change about themselves—and need to retain—in order to survive.

However unlike Lost or The Walking Dead (show and comic) the creators here clearly had a plan in place and never felt the need to pad out the series with filler or repetitive story arcs. Over the course of the series there are new revelations about the nature of the woods, characters join or leave the main group, and there is drastic character growth all around. Each installment is organically built upon the last, advancing the greater plot towards a satisfying conclusion. The creators knew when to wrap things up, end the story, and walk away.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.