Seven Ways Megacrossovers Fail

Against my better judgment, I occasionally read megacrossover events. I bought Day of Judgment, expecting something really moving and found a story I didn't really care about filled with moments I didn't really care about and characters I didn't really care about (plus one precious exchange when Alan Scott chose to snap at Batman for his hypercritical kibitzing).

For whatever unfathomable reason, I furthermore gleaned Zero Hour: Crisis in Time from a bagged set rack at a comics shop. There we had a piece that baited me with the featured talent and delivered mostly confusion, albeit some beautifully visual confusion.

And, again, some morbid curiosity made me investigate the trade paperback issue of The Infinity Gauntlet.

In general, events such as those that dominate megacrossovers fail to attract me to the title, with the return of Hal Jordan in Day of Judgment providing an exception. The talent does more to drag me in, though sometimes writers do more and sometimes artists do more to fix the hook in my mouth on these pieces.

More often than not, however, I ignore these events and simply blink at the gaps in my comics collection suggested when stories jump into and out of the latest event. "Sins of Youth?" "JLApe?" I couldn't tell you much about these, and I don't really regret the omission.

It seems like more than simple disinterest keeps me away from megacrossover events, however. Do these pieces tend to fit a pattern whose formulaic components consistently work to keep me from taking such items near a cash register?

Vice I: Contempt for the Consumer's Veto Power

The megacrossover attempts to override a reader's normal veto power. A reader normally leaves books behind whose characters or talent fail to interest him; the megacrossover, however, aims to create a story that touches the entire product line of a publisher such that a reader will lose a chapter or a key event by overlooking the books he has chosen to overlook.

Stubbornness moves me to resist such a crass approach to make me buy books I have decided not to buy. No, however, means no when I say it, and begging, pleading, bribing, and teasing won't incline me to greater cooperation; instead, they will help vulcanize my opposition.

The earlier megacrossover events hadn't become quite so decadent about arm-twisting the reader into buying an entire product line, but as time goes on, they increasingly place the key plot developments in the poorer-selling books, so that readers who don't buy the flagging titles can't understand the overall events of the megacrossover.

For me, however, "No" means "No." If I don't intend to buy a series, I certainly won't allow a megacrossover to prod me, particularly since I've already figured out that the universe-shattering events of this summer will become obsolescent by the universe-shattering events of next summer.

Vice II: Inhuman Scope

In a story in which the universe itself serves as the stake, one can't expect the events to have much relation to a purely human scale.

To justify logically the sort of calamity that would call for the assemblage of the entire stable of DC or Marvel superheroes means that writers must find some problem that threatens to destroy at least the earth and probably the galaxy and possibly the whole of spacetime, either single or multiple.

In such a context, the quirks of individual heroes frequently fail to matter or to register at all. If some power intends to (say) erase history from the point of the Big Bang until the Big Crunch, can we assign any relevance to the fact that the Thing smokes stinky cigars on occasion?

In the Infinity Gauntlet series, for instance, superheroes join together to confront the latest appearance of Thanos, the overused and trite Starlin villain whose obsession with death frequently provides a supposedly chilling threat to superheroes or the world. Thanos has become godlike and godlike Adam Warlock must muster the forces to fight his insane scheme to end so much life that the female personification of Death will grant him the favor of her attentions and goodwill.

I recall a scene where Thanos waved his hand and wiped out half the living beings in the universe. It failed to compel me. I found much more gripping content in an old Spirit piece where a fight went on for a page or two, with the Spirit and some goon busting chairs over each other's heads until they both became bleeding, black, and blue, preliminary to the Spirit coming through in the end but looking like 150 pounds of spoiled hamburger. Why? Because the Spirit sequence had something like a human face.

After all, we can easily imagine either having someone hit us with a chair or hitting someone with a chair. We can imagine the bruised and ripped skin, the possibly broken bones, the thud of the chair hitting (and possibly of the victim hitting the floor afterwards). We can relate to having to plod on even covered with bruises and (perhaps) even broken bones. But we can't relate to waving a hand and having half the beings in the universe disappear.

Vice III: Overcrowding

Consider a conventional comic to have limited resources. Counting generously, we might name these resources as panels and pages. A comic could have 20 pages of six panels apiece (though the average tends towards fewer panels than this), or a total of 120 panels.

Consider, too, a megacrossover event that attempts to feature 300 superheroes. For each one of these characters to have a single moment with a panel to himself would require almost three complete books, barring any connective panels that necessity would compel a storyteller to use to make sense of these 300 cameos.

Expand a megacrossover event to 12 issues - a good 1440 panels, if my math serves - and those same 400 characters fare little better. Assigned space equally, each would receive little over 3 panels onscreen if the artists and writers chose to assign a single character to a panel.

Think of that: about three panels. If your favorite superhero, some figure who doesn't rate his own book, appeared in a 12-issue megacrossover event, you might count on his having a good three panels to himself.

Could this justify purchasing 12 books at $3 US per issue? Who, for instance, would care to spend 36 dollars plus tax to see three panels of the Blue Devil or of Deadman - or, on the other side of the comics aisle, of Paladin or of Quasar?

More likely, though, each character won't get his three panels. A cluster of more popular characters, meaning those who can already sell their own books, will tend to dominate the on-panel count. And we have here a zero-sum problem, since every panel dominated by Wolverine or whoever serves as Celebrity Superhero du Jour means one less that can contain the obscure fan favorite characters.

Even so, these pieces don't have the room to feature even a few characters too prominently. The sheer number of cameos will force big guns into a more peripheral role.

Therefore, in a megacrossover you would do well to abandon hopes about any particular character. The huge cattle call of inactive heroes might make a piece worthwhile, depending on one's tastes and the emphasis of the megacrossover, but single heroes figure less prominently than one can see in their own books.

In a chorus line of a hundred performers, one can generally ignore most of the hundred without any loss of comprehension of the events on the stage, and a similar redundancy applies to the cast of a megacrossover.

Vice IV: Doing Laundry in Public

Megacrossovers do some fans a favor by taking expired or dormant superheroes out of the moth balls and giving them a panel or two on a page.

However, in today's ephemeral superhero comics market, series frequently die in medias res, without any resolution to ongoing threads, and the megacrossover frequently provides the only available venue to close off such open threads for the more obscure character.

Thus we may also have one or two panels of expository captions or dialogue explaining what happened after the cliffhanger in the last issue of a cancelled book. So, therefore, you have disposable sequences like the exchange in Day of Judgment between Outsiders veterans Katana and Geo-Force that hardly enough of them remain of the Outsiders team to compose a team - hardly a fitting resolution to those fans who followed Batman and the Outsiders through that series' history.

If a story merits completion, it merits more than a conversational exchange. If it doesn't, it can appear as a footnote (or not at all). But this approach suggests the sweeping of cigar butts under a rug - and that while one's guests look on.

Vice V: Stalling for Time

A megacrossover intends to sell as many comics as possible first, and tell a story second. To this end, such an event fulfills its primary purpose best by dragging out for as many issues as it dares. The attention spans of readers, rather than any aesthetic mercy on the part of publishers, serve as the limiting factor - the publishers might draw one of these pieces out for years if they suspected that their captive audiences would follow it to the end, however long deferred.

Consider, for example, the "Operation Galactic Storm" megacrossover that occupied many central Marvel titles during one point in the early nineties. While this piece did well aesthetically, avoiding many of the decadent storytelling practices typical of later megacrossovers, it nonetheless involved a prodigal number of books to cover the entire story, some of which had generally poor circulation. Therefore, for the collector who wishes to view this tale in its entirety, the very length of the piece, combined with the obscurity of some of its components, make it very difficult indeed to locate.

Where the comics of an earlier day might attempt to complete a story in a mere five pages, or more typically ten, we can routinely see in the megacrossover pieces that involve hundreds of pages, a tally that far outstrips the potential of the unifying concept.

Vice VI: Subordinating the Comics Creator

Some of the best comics pieces derive from the vision of a single talent who operates essentially devoid of editorial micromanagement. Steve Ditko did his best work in the early sixties when Stan Lee stood aside and let the man make pages.

However, few talents have the ability to create and manage a megacrossover without resorting to creation-by-committee. Perhaps Jim Shooter could manage the writing side of such a piece, though doubtless not at the best of his authorial abilities, and doubtless again at the expense of more trampled feelings and possibly damaged careers.

Megacrossovers, by their very scale and nature, impose creation-by-committee, and many of us have come to dread the kind of output that committee thinking produces. As the committee grows, it seems, what it produces becomes less valid and less to the point.

By the time one reaches the point of the 24-issue megacrossover, no particular artist or writer has a particularly discernible impact any more. This suggests a question: If a talent has no impact on what he works on, why have him produce at all?

Sometimes megacrossovers retain a focus, at least in the core series. Crisis on Infinite Earths managed this to a unique extent; Infinity Gauntlet and "Operation Galactic Storm" managed this to a lesser degree. But pieces like Day of Judgment and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time show a frequently shabby lack of focus.

Vice VII: Obstructing Traffic

Meanwhile, while a megacrossover ties up a company's entire product line, the ongoing story threads must either suspend forward progress until the event's completion or resolve abruptly. This compromises or undermines the ongoing flow of the titles conscripted into the megacrossover event.

After the completion of these events, furthermore, they frequently leave new obstructions to storytelling - for after each, more disposable or unfortunate material becomes part of the Inviolable Trail of Continuity. So future stories must detour around the frequently shoddy and typically grotesque edifices of past years' megacrossovers.

Sometimes the event becomes a new building in the middle of the road to detour around, other times it becomes a pothole - meaning something best avoided but not necessarily seen, such as DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths (an event conveniently forgotten by surviving principals) or Marvel's Heroes Reborn (which itself became the nucleus of a crossover event a few years after the experiment failed).

As with traffic obstructions, one learns with experience that traveling in the vicinity of road blockages, one would do best to detour, and comics frequently do have to take that approach to find some fresh and open storytelling space, however little might remain on the scarred landscape of inherited continuity. It tells a great deal that, in DC's case, they continue to detour around their two major continuity-revising megacrossovers; and, furthermore, that they received such howls of outrage at the introduction of "Hypertime," a device that might make all the devastation following Crisis have occurred for nothing (though I consider this fear unreasonable and see Hypertime, used in moderation, as a storytelling device that will allow writers some freedom from the Continuity Straightjacket).

Should we even expect much from megacrossovers, based on real world experience? Not really, even if some of the earliest ones did have entertaining moments or even bursts of excellence (for instance, Crisis on Infinite Earths). Should we routinely shun them? Again, not necessarily - the premise of each might matter differently to different readers, and we should remember that one size does not fit all. However, one might well temper the consumption of megacrossover material with hindsight and wait for things like trade paperback editions. At least in that form the producer must provide the central thread of the story.

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Column 223. Completed 10-FEB-2001.