Earlier this week I started a series on annoying aspects of comic books. I love to read comic books but there are some things that just annoy me. In the first part I talked about the constant killing and resurrecting of comic book characters. Either leave the characters dead or don’t kill them! The second annoying things about comic books are crossovers.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind a crossover between two comics or a guest appearance of one character in another comic book. I’d love to see someone like Deadpool show up in Spiderman. I think it would be cool if the Runaways had a three or four issue arc with X-Factor or something like that. Those kinds of thing are great and comic books are one of the few forms of entertainment that can pull that off. I doubt we’re ever going to see Jack Bauer show up on Heroes and I doubt we’re ever going to see John McClane fight the Terminator.
The kind of crossovers I’m talking about are the huge events. In particular the ones that force you to read comics you don’t want to read. The most recent big events I read were Marvel’s Civil War and DC’s 52. They weren’t too bad since there was a title dedicated to the event where most of the story took place. Civil War was a little bit more frustrating since all the comics tied into Civil War so if you had no interest in Civil War then that comic wasn’t all that good but at least you didn’t have to read every single side story to understand what was going on in the Civil War title. If big events are always handled like that then maybe it will be ok.
The events I don’t like though are events that take place in several different comics and you have to read them all to understand what’s going on. If Marvel had an event between Cable & Deadpool, X-Factor, Spiderman, and Runaways that would be cool because I read all those titles but what are the chances that they would ever do an event with all of the titles I like and only the titles I like? Not very good. It’s more likely that Marvel would force me to read Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and Avengers just in order for me to understand what is going on in Spiderman. No offense to any of those titles, it’s not that I don’t like them. I’ve heard some of those titles are really good. But I have a budget here. I don’t make that much money. I write for a living so surely comic book writers can understand where I’m coming from when I say that I can’t buy seventy-two comic books a month.
I don’t think I’m in the minority here either. I don’t know a whole lot of comic book fans but I’m pretty sure every single one that I do know is with me on this so it makes me wonder why they have continued to do this. Maybe Civil War and 52 are the beginning of a new trend. One can only hope.
