Managing the Event: Then and Now

Here in the Year of Superhero Event Comics, we’ve by this point become pretty accustomed to the yearly cycle. Every year there’s a point where all the books in a shared universe intersect and stake a common ground, then separate again for a while, then come together the next year. Events have stopped merely being important simply for the sake of providing a sales tentpole; the event comic has become the glue that holds a shared universe together. Every year, something big happens that affects everybody, and this provides a framework whereby the different stories can coalesce and characters can touch base while also providing most writers and books the ability to simply continue with their own stories if they so desire.

We’re seeing two very structurally different events right now - Final Crisis takes place in a time period entirely separate from the rest of DC’s line (with the exception of Green Lantern). Reading Batman or Superman or Checkmate, you’d have absolutely no idea that there’s a Crisis on if not for the house ads. While every book staking a common ground has been hinted as occurring after this event, for the most part, it’s entirely self-contained, not unlike Morrison’s previous Seven Soldiers. By virtue of this, its structure is small - a main series, two ancillary series that so far seem more like they’re pushing their respective writer’s ongoing DC Universe plots than really interacting with Morrison’s story, and a handful of oneshots (including the cleft-in-two Superman Beyond). And an unofficial #35.5 of Green Lantern, and a three-issue build-up to Flash: Rebirth (not to knock Rogues’ Revenge, it was awesome, and it was greatly informed by Final Crisis, but it didn’t in any way seem to really inform the main narrative itself). This tight and controlled creative approach has led to many people calling it the “arthouse” take on an event; while it certainly matches previous Crises in scale, it’s paced like a horror movie and I really can’t imagine any logical way ongoing books could have been tied into this without getting, well, completely fucked up.

Secret Invasion, on the other hand, is fucking everywhere. You can’t escape it. If a book isn’t tying in, then it has a support miniseries to take that role. Even the books that didn’t have that, such as Captain America, have taken care to show as in this latest issue that it does take place after the events of Secret Invasion. It’s also, unlike Final Crisis, insanely sprawling, reaching to over a hundred individual issues of a large number of ongoings - New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Thunderbolts, Captain Britain and MI: 13, She-Hulk, X-Factor, Avengers: The Initiative, New Warriors, Guardians of the Galaxy, Nova, Incredible Hercules, Punisher War Journal, Deadpool and Black Panther. That is a lot of comics, until you look at the sizes of the arcs - with the exception of the Avengers titles, none of those books had more than four consecutive tie-in issues, with some as few as one or two. Some of them are directly reacting to the events in the main book; others are simply telling stories on their own time that relate in one form or another to the basic premise. Some of these are arcs that take place within the ongoing stories of the main series, such as New Warriors or Incredible Hercules, some of them are fill-ins like Black Panther, and some of them are launching entirely new titles. So at the end of the day, when you look at whatever may unite the different Secret Invasion books, it’s not a thematic unity, it’s just that they take place around the same time and have Skrulls in them.

What’s really interesting to me about this, though, is just how radically different both of these approaches are from the way I’m used to thinking about an event. A while ago, the term “event” was considered synonymous with “crossover,” and while that’s largely not the case anymore (crossovers are sequential stories that go from one book to the other - think Messiah CompleX) it was pretty damn easy to see why they were considered as such when I sat down to reread my favorite comic book from my late childhood…

Zero Hour: Crisis in Time

Yeah. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. It never really dawned on me as a kid just how little sense this series made, but you know you’re in for some pretty special leaps in time-travel logic when the opening caption is “The End of Time. 36 hours ago.”

That aside, it’s pretty surprising when you realize this whole book came out over the span of one month, including all of its tie-ins. The tie-ins weren’t unimportant, either; they usually contained key scenes between issues, making it incredibly clear that the series simply wasn’t meant to be read in sequential order from, uh, 4 to 0 (DC should really avoid doing books with “countdown” numbering in the future), it was meant to be read in conjunction with the Superman books and Batman books and JSA and Justice League and whatever the hell else was coming out in 1994. The end of each issue would even have a page dedicated to telling you where each dangling subplot from each issue was going. People say these days that events are corporate shills designed simply to sell more books, and that might be true to a degree, but the fact of the matter is that Secret Invasion really reads just fine as a single story, and while reading Bendis’s Avengers issues that tie in certainly helps inform a great deal of the background, it’s background that is largely only applicable to longtime readers, and SI gives you pretty much all you need to know if you want to see some superheroes beat the shit out of some aliens. If a dude does a fake-out death in Secret Invasion, that’s where they’ll reveal the fake-out. Not Zero Hour.

Wally West “dies” in, like, the first issue of Zero Hour and then is barely ever mentioned again. This leads directly into the next issue of his own book, where he discovers the Speed Force. However, this is never mentioned in the main Zero Hour title, and the book basically ends with everybody still thinking he’s dead. This is all the book is - a bunch of moments setting up events in certain ongoing titles, combined with moving Zero Hour moments to books that had to drop THEIR own ongoing storylines, all set around a bizarre framing device where the narrator is counting down the hours to the end, despite the story jumping throughout time (so whose relative timeline are we following?) and a second-to-last-issue reveal of Hal Jordan that ended up paying off in Green Lantern rather than Zero Hour.

The book, by nature of the crossover/event framework that was applied, basically reads like being in the hallway of a really huge party and never entering any rooms, so all you do is see snippets of conversation as people go from room to room, and the dudes who own the rooms hang out in the hallway because party guests are wrecking them. So you’ll see some dude call another guy’s girlfriend a slut in the hallway, then they’ll threaten to take it outside, then go outside to fight and you never fucking find out what happens. Not unless you go buy Outside #0, on sale now for only $1.95.

Even Zero Hour is less offensive along these lines than the sprawling DC One Million, which actually makes zero sense when read from #1 to #4, with hugely important plot beats (the modern JLA members deciding to try to get to the JLA HQ in the future; Huntress coming up with the time capsule idea; Starman being revealed as a traitor) all taking place in side books. While we get echoes of that with stuff like the Jessica Drew reveal taking place in New Avengers, these are still occurrences that get properly shown in the main book.

I’m not sure what the future of the event is, although I do think that it’s now an inextricable part of the machinery that drives the development of superhero universes. It sells, it works, and no matter what your opinion of either Final Crisis or Secret Invasion it’s impossible to call either book a cynical money-grab, as both Morrison and Bendis have clearly put a lot of thought and effort into these stories. They aren’t events so they can make more money, they’re events because they are really damn big stories that actually logically affect a great swath of characters and titles. I’m curious to see how Final Crisis integrates itself back into the main DC Universe come January to March, while the effects of the end of Secret Invasion should be fairly quickly evident with the much-hyped Dark Reign. Meanwhile, there’s no doubt that DC’s next major storyline is 2009’s Blackest Night story spinning out of the ongoing Green Lantern books, but how expansive is that actually going to be? Will DC be able to pull off having their major tentpole event be a story that only affects a relatively small fraction of their titles, or will they expand the scope of Blackest Night to encompass the entire DC Universe? If so, will this strengthen Johns’s ideas by widening the scope or dilute them? And just what the hell does Marvel have planned next? Tom Brevoort intimated (I forget if it was on his blog or at a panel) that their 2009 offering will be structured differently - how will that work?

Anyway, just some thoughts on a Sunday morning.