The Annual Comic Book Massive Crossover Event

By Kerey McKenna.
Part III of a Series.

In Parts I and II of this series, I traced the rise of the Massive Crossover Event in movies and TV, coming to a climax in this weekend’s box office record for the opening of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War. But back in the world of comics, where superhero crossovers were born in the 1940s, things might not be going so well.

For those once mighty titans of childhood imagination that Disney and Warner Brothers keep around to keep generating more superheroes to one day adapt for TV and Movies, things are going a bit more The Mummy than Infinity War. Is it possible that fans no longer want to see big crossover events with heroes and villains duking it out? Is it possible EVENT FATIGUE is a drag on the growth of comic book purchases, deterring new readers from getting into comics, and sending once loyal readers elsewhere?

I had my own episode of event fatigue as a young reader due to the Onslaught event. I call it my “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine” moment.

Fans of the annual holiday classic, A Christmas Story, should immediately get the reference: in one scene in the movie the now adult narrator takes us through the childhood anticipation of collecting Ovaltine labels, sending away for a special prize, a Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring, initiating him into the “secret circle” that helps his favorite classic radio character in her adventures. Receiving the ring weeks later by mail (forever in “kid time”), he carefully decodes the special “secret circle” radio broadcast, only to discover that this “very important message” from the characters and entertainers he loves is… “Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine.” All this time, effort, and money spent on Ovaltine labels just for a commercial for more Ovaltine.

In 1996, the culmination of Marvel Comics’ event Onslaught left me with the same feelings of betrayal and cynicism. My childhood attention span and petty cash had been traded in on something that would just string me along with no satisfying end, just the next pitch to consume more product.

The Onslaught event started as part of the popular X-men series of books. Onslaught was a new villain, the corporeal gestalt of Magneto’s hatred and distrust of regular humanity combined with the darker urges and raw psychic power of Professor X. As this new creature gained power, he started causing problems all around Marvel’s shared world and came to challenge other Marvel icons like the Incredible Hulk, Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers. To follow the story you not only had to be reading the X-men books, but also the books of those other characters, many of which I usually didn’t buy. But this event seemed so BIG, I had to run around buying as many of those other comics as I could to follow the story.

Over the course of the event the different narrative threads where woven together leading the Marvel heroes to battle the monstrous Onslaught in New York City. With their combined might the heroes win the day, but at the cost of the lives of the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, and the heavy hitters of the Avengers. To me it felt like the proper ending to a story, that nothing could ever really be the same for a world that lost so many of its iconic heroes. But on the very last page there was a last minute reprieve from the editors. Fear not true believers, this is not the end of your beloved heroes, they will be REBORN.

Yes, much to my dismay at the time, I learned that on the heels of this event, a new series of books would launch called Heroes Reborn, a mini-series to create new, more contemporary origin stories for characters like the Fantastic Four and Iron Man. And while I read some of these books (mostly borrowed from friends), I felt let down that this big epic story wouldn’t have lasting consequences.

These events are becoming a pain for the artists and writers as well. Creative teams tasked with writing a monthly serial about one set of heroes now find that one or more issues have been hijacked by the story of another creative team. For example, the original Infinity Gauntlet mini-series from 1991, on which the new the Marvel movie is based, used one creative team (Jim Starlin, George Perez, and Ron Lim) to tell a grand story in sequence over 6 issues. In contrast last year’s Secret Empire Event (see my commentary on that controversial story here) ran from April to August of 2017 and by my reckoning played across over 50 issues, (eleven of those by a team tasked with the event and then the other issues parts of their regular runs tying in with the new storyline).

So now you have creative teams that had or were working to develop their own narrative style, voice, and ongoing story lines getting an editorial mandate that everything would be placed on the back burner as the fallout of Captain America seemingly handing over America to the crypto-fascist Hydra organization played out.

And this was an annoyance to both those readers who wanted to see Secret Empire play out, and those who would rather not follow the storyline of Captain America Sentinel of Liberty turning out to be a fascist sleeper agent. Those who wanted to see the story played out had to get all of the main books in the mini-series plus the tie-in and crossover books that might contain vital information. Those who were repulsed by the story had little choice but to simply not buy their regular issues until the whole thing blew over.

Even if those events left bad tastes in the readers’ mouths, they were admittedly trying to tell big grand stories. But other yearly events were more like company-wide pranks, DC being more fond of this thing sort of thing for a while. It ran the event JLApe: Gorilla Warfare in which the Justice League and other DC Characters where transformed into talking gorillas for the duration of the event.

It was a storyline so silly that years later the crew over at DC animation would look back on it and go out of their way to comment on the inanity.

As much as a shared universe of heroes and villains means to comic book fans, it’s possible that the big sprawling crossover event needs to be reined back in. As monthly comic book shop stand sales stagnate or decline, while digital readership and trade paperback collections increase, perhaps it is a time to return to a more self-contained mini-series style for large stories. One of my favorite big epic crossover stories was Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross which told a grand sprawling story across the DC universe but did it as a four issue mini-series managed by one creative team (and as a result holds up excellently as a graphic novel when published as a trade collection).

Similarly Marvel’s 2008 mini-series Old Man Logan by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven used the expansive Marvel lore to present a bleak future and a worn down world-weary Wolverine being pulled out of retirement for one last adventure.

If that premise sounds familiar it’s because it is the loose inspiration for Hugh Jackman’s farewell to the cinematic Wolverine in the film Logan. And that adaptation shrunk the scope of the bleak possible future too, from what happened to the entire Marvel universe, to what happened to the X-men and other mutants. Similarly the film Captain America: Civil War distilled some of the best parts of the premise of the Civil War Comics event, and smoothed out the rough edges by having the crossover aspects contained in one work. Yes, events from civil war are alluded to in other Marvel movies and TV series, but when Civil War: the Movie was playing in the theater the action didn’t have to be annotated with pop ups telling people to tune into Agents of SHIELD on ABC to get more of the story.

So although a shared universe is a device that works well for superhero comics, perhaps publishers should show a bit more care in how they expect their readership to explore these massive universes. Otherwise, they may find more and more readers dropping out to wait for clever Hollywood writers to make a better version of the story later.

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.