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Crossovers have done more to turn me off to superhero comics than almost anything else. But I totally get why they’re super profitable and why they’ll never end.
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Apr 24, 2020 21:50
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While we're at it is there a crossover that is considered "the best"? Obviously the Clone Saga is out it's too good but otherwise anything from DC or Marvel?
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Apr 24, 2020 21:50
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bessantj posted:While we're at it is there a crossover that is considered "the best"? Obviously the Clone Saga is out it's too good but otherwise anything from DC or Marvel? I don't know about other people but I really enjoy reading the Evolutionary War once in a while.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:12
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bessantj posted:While we're at it is there a crossover that is considered "the best"? Obviously the Clone Saga is out it's too good but otherwise anything from DC or Marvel? Acts of Vengeance was a lot of fun because it wasn't so much a story as it was an excuse to play around. "Hey everybody, for three months you can use any supervillain you want in your comics," is a great way for people to just do some cool things. And it gave us Magneto versus Red Skull. The actual storyline (and in particular the ending) weren't very good, but Armageddon 2001 gave us some really neat stories in those annuals. Nothing wrong with the recent Secret Wars crossover.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:35
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I don’t know about best, but Inferno was entertaining. I also enjoyed that Uncanny X-Men/Dark Avengers one.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:35
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The Thanos stuff Starlin did was a really early crossover.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:39
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The first infinity war was pretty good. For stuff that wasn't "this will affect the future of all comics" but was just storylines happening in multiple books, Kraven's Last Hunt, there was a crossover between Punisher, Spider-Man and the Mark Waid Daredevil book that was really good, the Kid Loki Journey into Mystery had a crossover with one of the New Mutants relaunches, those were all good.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:55
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I am loathe to count things like Inferno or Fall of the Mutants, as those were less "crossover-y" than we consider the term today; they mostly spun out of the mind of Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson, and so there was always seemingly a tighter focus because the story wasn't being handed off from one writer to another to another (also, a lot of those early X-events had fewer 'crossover' elements than we might think today; Fall of the Mutants, for instance, was less one big story than it was a bunch of separate, thematically related stories). Still, if you count 'em, Inferno holds up really well today IMO. If only for Daredevil getting beat up by a vacuum cleaner. But in terms of what we might think of as a crossover today, with a name and a logo and a rotating cast of creators and possibly even an ancillary book like a one-shot or miniseries to tie it all together... I feel like the X-Tinction Agenda still holds up. Marred by some pretty spotty art in some sections, granted, but it dovetailed in all the X-teams, told a story that involved everyone, had a really memorable villain in Cameron Hodge, and set up a new status quo on the flip side, what with the PAD X-Factor reboot and the expanded X-Men roster. EDIT: my favorite 'crossover' had no actual name or anything, but when the Cask of Ancient Winters was opened in a Thor storyline and covered the world in winter, just about every other Marvel book that month had at least one panel where the main characters remarked on the 'unseasonable weather'; it wasn't so much a crossover as just a good bit of coordination between editors, but still, I really got a kick out of it DivineCoffeeBinge fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 23:00
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Armageddon 2001. It was my first crossover and still the best.
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Apr 24, 2020 23:06
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I am loathe to count things like Inferno or Fall of the Mutants, as those were less "crossover-y" than we consider the term today; they mostly spun out of the mind of Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson, and so there was always seemingly a tighter focus because the story wasn't being handed off from one writer to another to another (also, a lot of those early X-events had fewer 'crossover' elements than we might think today; Fall of the Mutants, for instance, was less one big story than it was a bunch of separate, thematically related stories). Still, if you count 'em, Inferno holds up really well today IMO. If only for Daredevil getting beat up by a vacuum cleaner. Fall of the Mutants was more thematically linked stuff where each series was separate, but if you were reading either Uncanny X-Men or X-Factor and not the other Inferno would have been indescifrable without picking up a book you weren't reading before. Edit: The New Mutants and Excalibur parts were their own thing though. Air Skwirl fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 23:10
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:EDIT: my favorite 'crossover' had no actual name or anything, but when the Cask of Ancient Winters was opened in a Thor storyline and covered the world in winter, just about every other Marvel book that month had at least one panel where the main characters remarked on the 'unseasonable weather'; it wasn't so much a crossover as just a good bit of coordination between editors, but still, I really got a kick out of it I had that Thor storyline growing up, along with issues of X-Men, Spider-Man, and Avengers that happened concurrently to it (IIRC X-Men was just kicking off the Dire Wraiths arc at that point), and thought that was a neat touch. Simonson's run on Thor was just so good. That said, my favourite crossover-as-such is probably the original Secret Wars, simply because, as mentioned earlier, it's entirely self-contained. You can read Secret Wars on its own if you like even if you haven't read most (or any) of the individual series converging in it, and you can read those series without picking up Secret Wars and everything still makes sense. I absolutely hate the modern crossover approach of "everything is crossing over with everything else all the time, so if you want to follow what's going on you absolutely need to be reading these other six series and these two limited-run miniseries"; it's what made the otherwise excellent Loki: Agent of Asgard a lot less enjoyable for me. (This is not helped, I think, by the fact that superhero comics seem to also have moved away from narration boxes and the narrator having a voice at all; those boxes instead contain the character's thoughts, replacing thought bubbles, with the expectation that the character's words and internal monologue, and the art, are enough to carry the story. When this works, I prefer it, but it's not a good fit for things like "bringing the reader up to speed on all the bullshit that happened between the start of this issue and the end of the ostensibly previous one".) ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 23:17
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ToxicFrog posted:I absolutely hate the modern crossover approach of "everything is crossing over with everything else all the time, so if you want to follow what's going on you absolutely need to be reading these other six series and these two limited-run miniseries"; This isn't new. I'm reading the original New Mutants again, and every other issue is telling me to read a Fantastic Four to see the origin of Karma, read the Magick mini series, read Uncanny X-Men to see when Xavier went to space, etc.
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Apr 24, 2020 23:35
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I am probably repeating myself from earlier in this thread, but I think there have to be some distinctions made in terms of 'crossovers'. The vast majority of superhero comics before the Silver Age had a pretty loose sense of 'continuity', probably comparable to sitcoms from pre-2000 or whatever. There was continuity in the sense of "The Riddler! You're back! You escaped from jail?!?!" but not many multi-issue stories or meaningful status quo changes or etc. With the Silver Age both at DC and in early Marvel books, there was more of a soap opera-ish sense of continuity and the start of more *editor's notes where they'd explain that the Doctor Doom menacing Spider-Man is the same Doctor Doom that appeared a year earlier in Fantastic Four and is back from outer space or whatever, but in general there wasn't the idea that you had to read all of Fantastic Four to understand Amazing Spider-Man #5. The Avengers/Defenders War at Marvel was envisioned by Steve Englehart as a really ambitious thing where people would have to read both books to get a full story, which is different than the 'crossovers' that happened before. You could argue that if Iron Man walks into Avengers Mansion in Avengers #78 and he's wearing a different suit of armor that he was wearing in Avengers #77 and he goes "oh yeah, I built some new cool armor!* *see Iron Man #21" it's a 'crossover' but the Avengers/Defenders War was much more of a "at the end of Defenders #8 they're trapped in an alternate dimension, at the opening of Defenders #9 they're in the middle of a fight with Iron Man and Thor, want to know how it got here? Read Avengers #116!" and so on. A lot of people in the Marvel office didn't want Englehart to do this because they thought it would be confusing, but he did it and the world didn't end. It also didn't set the world on fire, so no one immediately decided that they needed to ape the crossover thing, but it was no longer seen as an enormous risk of losing readership. The other thing that I think is noteworthy about the Avengers/Defenders War to set it apart from future crossovers is that it was 100% Steve Englehart telling his story across multiple books, something happening less directly across all sorts of late 1960s/early 1970s Marvel books with a less direct throughline; Jim Starlin just sort of shoved Thanos mythos into whatever gig he got at first (from Iron Man to Marvel Feature to Captain Marvel) or I just saw a reference to "The Mister Kline War" which involved Gerry Conway using some pet villains in Iron Man, Daredevil, and Sub-Mariner. The modern era of "Crossover Events" definitely kicked off in the mid 1980s with Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars (I and II) but even then, those were (largely) one tentpole book and "tie-in" issues that spun out of the tentpole books. They were blown-out versions of the just-before-this-era things like the aforementioned Casket of Ancient Winters 'crossover' where something happened and other books addressed it, with the key difference between that (or the Dire Wraiths War) being that Secret Wars and Crises were very explicit marketing pushes where the companies were giving you the impression that you HAD to read them all. And really, for several years afterwards, most "crossovers" were closer to that than anything else; the Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants, Inferno, Acts of Vengeance, etc. were definitely stories where outside books were having an influence/getting referenced in other books, but if you wanted to know what was happening to the New Mutants in any of those you really just had to read New Mutants. The 1990s was when they really kicked Crossover Events into their probably best-known, least-liked form, with X-Men crossovers like X-Tinction Agenda and X-Cutioner's Song very explicitly taking over all of the books for months and not even pretending it's the book starring the title characters anymore. X-Cutioner's Song has a particularly infamous issue (X-Factor 85, part 6 of 12) where the main X-Factor team appears in less than half of the issue, with the main storyline being a three-way fight between Bishop, Cable, and Wolverine, none of whom are part of X-Factor. There's a one page interlude advancing X-Factor team member Madrox's storyline, two more interludes featuring Cyclops and Apocalypse (also not members of X-Factor), and the big group battle scene that takes up the other ten pages features the X-Factor team but they take a back seat in terms of action and dialogue to Gambit, Storm, Cannonball, Iceman, Rogue, Archangel, and various other people who are not part of X-Factor. It's basically what made Peter David quit working on the X-Books for a decade. So maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome or PTSD that makes me not really mind the 1980s style of "mention that a character had an origin story in a different book" 'crossing over', or even some of the more modern "you don't actually have to read the other books, but know that Norse villains are invading the Earth" Events. It beats what was going on in the 1990s.
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Apr 25, 2020 00:40
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I actually thought Mutant Massacre was another one where you only needed to read what you were already reading, but if you were reading other books it would add to it. But now I'm trying to read X-Factor and during Mutant Massacre one issue ends with Angel stapled to the wall by his wings and the villains approaching him and the next he's still injured but safely in the care of the rest of X-Factor with a note saying read Thor to see what happened. Also, I loving hate the recoloring on Walt Simonson's Thor, and it's a huge whiplash to jump to that while reading X-Factor which is also drawn by Walt Simonson. Also, also, how the gently caress was Walt Simonson able to write and draw Thor and draw X-Factor during high water marks for both those books?
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Apr 25, 2020 00:57
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Walt Simonson was and is really loving good, that's how
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Apr 25, 2020 01:33
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Walt Simonson was and is really loving good, that's how I know he's good, but there's only a certain number of hours in the day to do all that.
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Apr 25, 2020 01:37
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Skwirl posted:I know he's good, but there's only a certain number of hours in the day to do all that. Granted, though Simonson apparently started writing his Thor story - the broad strokes of the idea, I assume, if not all the specifics - in college in 1967, so that probably helped. Beyond that, IIRC he didn't start doing the art on X-Factor until he'd stopped drawing Thor and let Sal Buscema handle the art on that book.
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Apr 25, 2020 01:48
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Granted, though Simonson apparently started writing his Thor story - the broad strokes of the idea, I assume, if not all the specifics - in college in 1967, so that probably helped. Beyond that, IIRC he didn't start doing the art on X-Factor until he'd stopped drawing Thor and let Sal Buscema handle the art on that book. I just went back and looked and you are correct, Buscema was doing art during the Mutant Massacre crossover. The new coloring on Thor through me off enough I assumed the penciler was still the same.
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Apr 25, 2020 01:57
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Are Rogue and Gambit still married?
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Apr 25, 2020 03:45
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yes
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Apr 25, 2020 03:49
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I forgot about the mister Kline war. That was an interesting early crossover thing. Not an event like avengers / defenders, but, like the Thanos story, a clear through line that you kinda needed to read in order to get the full picture. Though it fizzled out a bit of I recall correctly.
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Apr 25, 2020 03:53
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The only crossovers I ever cared for are Batman related ones and oh boy do they range from great to poo poo with not much middle ground.
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Apr 25, 2020 03:55
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Walt Simonson was and is really loving good, that's how A true master of the craft. And his signature is a dinosaur. 
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Apr 25, 2020 07:46
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Madkal posted:The only crossovers I ever cared for are Batman related ones and oh boy do they range from great to poo poo with not much middle ground. Greatest and shittest?
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Apr 25, 2020 08:04
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Edge & Christian posted:The 1990s was when they really kicked Crossover Events into their probably best-known, least-liked form, with X-Men crossovers like X-Tinction Agenda and X-Cutioner's Song very explicitly taking over all of the books for months and not even pretending it's the book starring the title characters anymore. It seems like the reason you don't get those X-Tinction Agenda style ones anymore is that instead of hijacking the main books, there's a main event series and then the regular books tie into that to whatever degree the writers like/are cajoled into. It looks like the first one of those would have been House of M? There's a pretty big dearth of crossover stuff during Morrison/Austen/early Whedon X-men stuff, save for single book stuff like Exiles running into Mutant X Havok and stuff like that. Disassmbled was a little before that and that ran in the regular Avengers title.
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Apr 25, 2020 11:15
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IUG posted:This isn't new. I'm reading the original New Mutants again, and every other issue is telling me to read a Fantastic Four to see the origin of Karma, read the Magick mini series, read Uncanny X-Men to see when Xavier went to space, etc. This is true, but "check out this other issue to see a cool thing that's relevant but not necessary to this storyline" is significantly different, at least to me, from "between the end of the previous issue and the start of this one, these characters have had an entire story arc that dramatically changes everything -- and no, we're not even going to try to summarize it, good luck". And yes, I realize that's basically what Secret Wars did, but they did actually fill you in as necessary even if you hadn't read it, and the changes were a lot easier to summarize (Spidey has a new suit found in an alien lab, She-Hulk is part of the FF while Thing is on sabbattical, Colossus broke up with Kitty Pryde, etc). Edge & Christian posted:So maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome or PTSD that makes me not really mind the 1980s style of "mention that a character had an origin story in a different book" 'crossing over', or even some of the more modern "you don't actually have to read the other books, but know that Norse villains are invading the Earth" Events. It beats what was going on in the 1990s. Story time! As a kid I spent many a happy hour going through my parents' box of comics, which collected nearly complete runs of X-Men, Thor, Spider-Man, Avengers, West Coast Avengers, and Iron Man from the early 80s to 1988-89 or so. Among other things, that meant I had most of Simonson's legendary run on Thor, the Hobgoblin and Venom story arcs in Spider-Man, and the Brood, Starjammers, and Dire Wraiths in X-Men. (And the Dark Phoenix arc, since they had the trade of that.) The other three didn't grab me as much, although I do have fond memories of the Avengers/Spidey team-up at Project Pegasus. My dad was even able to borrow Secret Wars from someone at work so I could read it! And I loved them! It's what got me interested in comics, and since then I've gone back and re-read a bunch of my favourites and, for the most part, they still hold up. And while there is a fair bit of "as seen in [other series]" or "continued in [other series]", you could pretty much always follow what was going on, and if you really needed to know the helpful narrator would fill you. Around the mid-90s I had completely exhausted my parents' collection several times over and decided to start buying some comics of my own. So I took my allowance in hand and went out to my friendly local comic shop and grabbed a few recent issues of Spider-Man and X-Men. I knew I'd be picking them up in the middle of a storyline, but, well, I'd done that already with my parents' collection, sometimes multiple times over if there were gaps in the collection, and figured I wouldn't have any trouble getting back into them now, either. After that I basically ignored long-run superhero comics for two decades, sticking to webcomics and limited-run stuff like Planetary, Nextwave, and The Red Star. I'm only very recently starting to get interested in them again (largely due to lurking in this forum), and even then I'm avoiding the main series and sticking to relatively self-contained stuff like Squirrel Girl, Gwenpool, and Agent of Asgard (which turned out not to be nearly as self-contained as I had expected, oh well).
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Apr 25, 2020 13:52
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Rhyno posted:A true master of the craft. Interesting. Was reading Fantastic Four #345 from 1990, which was written by Simonson Mamenchisaurus and feathered velociraptors are depicted. You had to be pretty enthusiastic about paleontological reading to come across either back then. The Jurassic Park movie wouldn't hit theaters for three years (and the book wouldn't be published until late '90).
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Apr 25, 2020 14:23
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Walt fuckin loves Dinosaurs.
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Apr 25, 2020 16:22
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bessantj posted:Greatest and shittest? No Man's Land (or Officer Down for a shorter one) and....I don't know, Return of Ras Al Ghul or War Games.
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Apr 25, 2020 19:24
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I just finished rereading Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run and now I gotta ask, how did they get Kitty back from the giant world destroying bullet?
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Apr 26, 2020 00:59
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Magneto brought the giant bullet back to earth and ripped it apart.
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Apr 26, 2020 01:03
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I vaguely recall it also screwed with her powers but I don't remember the deets, something something phased too long or whatever edit: I checked, she was unable to unphase for a while, but then died and came back to life in an alien ritual with her powers normal. X-men Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 01:20
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Endless Mike posted:Magneto brought the giant bullet back to earth and ripped it apart. This was in Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men. He does this to convince the X-Men to let him join them on Utopia.
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Apr 26, 2020 01:27
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Open Marriage Night posted:This was in Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men. He does this to convince the X-Men to let him join them on Utopia. That was a really great moment. Fraction really got Magneto and the need to adapt him to modern day.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:14
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Rhyno posted:That was a really great moment. Fraction really got Magneto and the need to adapt him to modern day. That era of X-books would probably have a lot more acclaim if there weren't constant loving crossovers.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:23
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Skwirl posted:That era of X-books would probably have a lot more acclaim if there weren't constant loving crossovers. Oh for sure, such a mess. I still own as much of it as I could get in HC though.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:33
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Skwirl posted:That era of X-books would probably have a lot more acclaim if there weren't constant loving crossovers. There are so many eras of the X-books that this statement applies to.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:43
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Lurdiak posted:There are so many eras of the X-books that this statement applies to. There's also several eras that deserve no acclaim whatsoever, regardless of the number of crossovers.
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Apr 26, 2020 07:45
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Madkal posted:No Man's Land (or Officer Down for a shorter one) and....I don't know, Return of Ras Al Ghul or War Games. Thanks, I haven't read a lot of Batman so I haven't read any of those. Skwirl posted:There's also several eras that deserve no acclaim whatsoever, regardless of the number of crossovers. I remember a comics tropes episode where he talked about Chuck Austen doing a terrible run on X-Men. bessantj fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 10:00
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Open Marriage Night posted:This was in Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men. He does this to convince the X-Men to let him join them on Utopia. That issue also has a cool backup about a planet that sees the bullet coming toward it, their society kind of goes apeshit at the impending apocalypse, and then it passes through them and everybody has to deal with "oh, we're all still here".
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Apr 26, 2020 12:14
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