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Article 10: Crossover And Over Again
Never go online when you're half awake. You will be easily confused. I was half awake when I followed a link to Pop Culture Shock, the site that hosts Tim O'Neil's comic remixes. I laughed out loud at the front page. I moved to page two. I was confused. Where were the jokes? This wasn't very funny. Page three. Still no jokes. Hmm. At this point the penny dropped that I was not reading one of Tim's parodies. I was in fact reading a genuine preview of a DC comic. But with a title like COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS, you can hardly blame me for getting confused. I gawped in disbelief for a bit, and then headed off in search of coffee. After a few years of relative respite, we seem to be firmly back in the realm of the Big Event Comic. Or rather, a specific sort of Big Event. It's not that we haven't had big events over the last few years, but they've been marketing events rather than in-story events. For titles like ASTONISHING X-MEN or ULTIMATES, for example, the big event is the mere fact that the book in question exists, rather than anything in particular that happens in it. They are big events in the "everyone's talking about it" sense. But with IDENTITY CRISIS, AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED, HOUSE OF M and - do they generate these names by computer? - INFINITE CRISIS, we're back in a different sort of big event; the big huge story that shakes everything up and changes things. Preferably in the form of a big sprawling crossover that spreads itself over a large chunk of the line. Line-wide crossovers have gone hugely out of fashion in recent years. Marvel haven't done one since MAXIMUM SECURITY, and that was five years ago. Off the top of my head, I can't even remember the last DC effort. It's hard to say that we've missed the things. And even the dumbest publishers seemed to at least recognise that they caused an awful problem with trade paperbacks. So what changed? Why go back to them? Three main reasons, I suspect. Number one, Marvel and DC have always had a firm motto of, 'Never waste time coming up with a new idea when you can recycle an old one'. Both companies have a little cupboard of concepts and strategies that never really work, but that keep getting wheeled out every few years on the grounds that they've had a rest, and it might work this time. It's been a while since we've had major crossovers. If you work from the assumption that they were never a bad idea in the first place, merely overexposed and badly done, then you might take the view that we've had a rest from them, the audience has detoxified, and the time is ripe to give this excellent device another shot. There is some truth to this. Crossovers were exciting when they were rare; they were overexposed to the point of meaninglessness; and they were done so gratuitously that many of them were absolute crap. Whether you think they're a good or bad thing in principle, there's no denying that the dismal quality of most mid-nineties crossovers only served to drag down their reputation. Number two, the pendulum did perhaps swing a bit too far in the other direction. Part of the formula for successful superhero comics used to be the illusion of change. Readers like the idea that a series is going somewhere; they become disillusioned when they realise that it isn't. Of course, you can never really take most titles too far from their core concept, at least not permanently. So the potential for change is limited, and instead you have to go for the illusion. If it's done well, most readers can be made to stick around for a good few years before they finally twig that everything has come full circle for the second or third time. But the illusion of change is simply an aspect of the illusion of importance. The story should feel like it matters. That's an essential of any story. And in fact, it's an illusion that is rather hard to create in ongoing serial comics. If you're making a film, you can leave the story open-ended, or drop some bombshell near the end, without actually having to deal with the fallout. The audience will fill in the blanks for themselves. If you're writing an ongoing comic, then the character's actually going to be there next month, and unless you're writing him out, you've got to do the follow-up. Matters get even more complicated in the world of the shared universe, where certain events logically ought to spill over into other titles. If your character is making guest appearances in other titles, then in theory they ought to be at least broadly consistent. If there's a spin-off book, then their characters might need to react as well. (Characters really ought to notice if their brother has just died, for example. It's remarkable how often they don't.) And if a character has three titles with different writers then some degree of interaction is logically unavoidable. After all, if the events in title one matter, how come titles two and three are able to ignore them altogether? Of course, just because something is logically unavoidable, it doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. Marvel in particular have been dreadful for this sort of thing over the last few years. In pursuit of making their books creator-driven, and presenting them to the market as such, Marvel pretty much marginalised continuity - not just in the 'gratuitous crossovers and references to other titles' sense, but in the 'basic consistency of the universe' sense. For example, Bruce Jones changed the status quo of the Hulk right at the start of his run, changing the character's powers and getting rid of the savage Hulk personality. But throughout his run on the book, not a single guest appearance in another title acknowledged any of that. In fact, even Jones himself didn't bother acknowledging it when he wrote a Hulk miniseries. It's difficult to see what the point is of allowing continuity to deteriorate to that extent; ultimately it just sends readers the message that the events they're reading are so trivial that even Marvel can't be bothered pretending that they matter. As for the Spider-Man titles, chronic parallel universe syndrome has set in. God only knows whether any of the writers even talk to one another. If they do, it certainly isn't apparent on the page. The two Fantastic Four books have a similar problem, as do the three X-Men books. If you're going to bother having a shared universe at all, you really need to give continuity a bit more weight than that. And you can forget about having three Spider-Man titles that don't talk to one another. On the other hand, if you really want to do completely unrelated books featuring the same character, you need to bite the bullet and abandon the concept of a shared universe altogether. Publishers won't do that because they know readers like the shared universe, which is snuggly and familiar and warm. So they try to have it both ways. But that only works for so long. Having swung too far in that direction, the pendulum is now coming back the other way. And, in the way of such things, it's going to overcorrect. Hence, great big crossovers. Number three, a prevailing theme of the last few years has been Marvel and DC trying to work out how they're going to break out of the direct market hellhole and attract a wider audience again. The de-emphasis of history and continuity, and the elimination of interaction between titles, was an aspect of that. They were seen as barriers to accessibility. Nowadays, the approach is - marginally - more sophisticated. There's more of a focus on specific titles and formats that are trying to appeal to the new market. And along with that, there's a recognition that some books are just plain not going to work with that crowd, and should be allowed to get on with the job of entertaining the direct market faithful. Marvel seems to have grasped this point slightly better than DC, whose insistence on the mass-market potential of IDENTITY CRISIS was amusing, but also slightly sad. What's interesting about this approach is that it suggests Marvel and DC have finally resigned themselves to the fact that the new audience they're chasing is very different from the existing one they have, and that many of their recent efforts went wrong because they tried to appeal to both at once and fell between two stools. Acknowledging this is a step forward. It also means great big crossovers, which is a step back. But perhaps it signals that the major publishers have finally realised that they need to go in two different directions to reach these two audiences. And that would be the important thing. Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |