If you gauge how close summer is by the actual temperature, then you're probably staring at your North Face parka and wondering how long you can get away without washing it. But if you're the type of person who carves out some, or all, of your lunchtime to hit a dingy store full of long boxes on a Wednesday, then you know summer is right around the corner—because here come the event comics. You've got just seven weeks to go before Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones start up the "we promise this won't be delayed"
Final Crisis over at DC, the home of Superman and Ambush Bug, while Brian Michael Bendis and Lenil Yu will be kicking off the
Secret Invasion over at that other publishing company, Marvel or something. It's rumored they publish the X-Men, and possibly something about a skeleton who rides a flaming bicycle.
Event comics carry a massive amount of stigma surrounding them—while they're a buzzword any time a "What I hate about super-hero comics" conversation gets rolling, they sell like crazy, they produce successful ancillary spin-off titles, and they get people who normally confine their purchasing to specific families of books to experiment with some of the other titles. People who wouldn't be caught dead with a copy of Birds of Prey are far more likely to give the book a chance if they think their favorite Green Lantern Corps characters may show up for a panel or two, and people who only buy the Avengers may find themselves with a title split into three—all of which they're still keeping up with long after the fanfare of a major cross-over has been all but extinguished. It's not hard to see where the complaints come from, and quite a few of them are justifiable—almost all of the event titles end up doing little more than resetting the status quo that had existed prior to the beginning of the story, albeit with a few cosmetic changes to a character's outfit and a couple of hackneyed deaths of characters who probably weren't going to be joining the Justice League anytime soon. It'll be about two years from never when an Infinite Crisis kills a Superman, but that doesn't mean that fans of Pantha shouldn't be worried. Basically, if a character doesn't carry a successful title, or you haven't seen them effectively used in years, they're fair game for a hot grave.
It's arguable that recent years have changed that lack of "importance"—Marvel's
Civil War had some unusually far-reaching changes with its splitting of super-heroes into legal and illegal camps, but with a few exceptions, many of its titles are still relatively the same as they were prior to the days of "Whose Side Are You Sort Of Rooting For, That Is, If You Actually Are Taking This Seriously?"
Infinite Crisis, DC's recent cross-over, was a bit of an odder beast. Incorporating an editorial mandate in a more blatant fashion, while at the same time serving as a sequel of sorts to a maxi-series over twenty years old, it's suffered more criticism than it probably deserved. After all, the main point of these event comics, regardless of the hype, is always the money they make, the interest they breed for other titles, and the bragging rights that they "beat the other guys." Most super-hero comics buyers don't really care about that stuff—they just want all the action figures on the table, some type of world-annihilation plot, and some cliffhanger surprise twists. But at the end of it all, they still want Daredevil to fight muggers in Hell's Kitchen, they still want Batman to be Bruce Wayne, and they still want X-Men comics to make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Oh, and they want Cable to have his own series. Simple stuff like that.
With some trepidation, these next few series look to be somewhat interesting. Bendis and Yu have a pretty seamless partnership and
Secret Invasion looks to be as simple and straightforward an event as is possible: there are aliens, they're here on Earth already in secret, and no one in the Marvel universe knows who to trust. Cue the punching. Get some hip dialog in Luke Cage's mouth! Over at DC, Grant Morrison has pretty much kept the tides of spoilers at bay, and what he has described: "It opens with Anthro the Caveboy, and Kamandi's in there…"[1] sounds like DC just might be letting their star writer do whatever he pleases—which could mean it's another
Seven Soldiers, replacing Klarion the Witch Boy with Batman and Green Lantern, or it could be another
Invisibles, which means its appeal may be… well, somewhat limited. Either way, it's shaping up to be, well, you know.
Summer, to the extreme. At the end of the day, Marvel is going with a pretty straightforward action plot from some reliable creators, and DC is letting loose a man who's written some of the best super-hero comics that exist. That doesn't mean "get excited." But it does mean you're probably not going to see this branch of the comics industry get eaten by the
Wimpy Kid just yet.
Tucker Stone is proprietor of the comic book blog The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
