Events in comic books typically
are a great way to promote comic books. If nothing else, it will get exposure
to characters that might not be as well known to your typical comic book reader
and may very well increase the sales for that particular title. At one time
every year or two, many of the best known and not so quite as well-known
characters from the top comic book companies, Marvel and DC Comics all were
part of a mega story, both heroes and villains a like. It tended to be a
significant happening, as while crossovers did exist between various characters
and books, huge events did result in the potential of certain characters, both
heroes and villains alike rather mixing it up with different characters.
However, in recent years, have
events in comic books become a bit too common?
Events
in Comic Books-Really Not That Eventful In 2012.
The significant crossover events undoubtedly
were defined in the 1980s in comic books with the Secret Wars in Marvel and the
Crisis on Infinite Earths for DC Comic books, which defined the DC universe pretty
much until the recent reboot in the year of 2011. While the stories sometimes
were not with the best in the world, they did not exist without a sense of
urgency, with powerful threats, as all of the heroes joined forces, banding
together against the huge threat and often times with villains.
Then something changed in the
last decade or so. It appears as if events took place with increasing
frequency. Many individuals in key positions noticed that these events did impressive
business and they could do even more impressive business by doing the huge
crossover events on a more regular basis. Were they correct? The results tended
to vary, both with fan response and also with sales figures. Many of these huge events from both companies
were received rather well and more than a few comic book crossover events went
over about as well as a fart in church.
The key issue with events in
comic books to me is the following. It is extremely easy to market a comic book
storyline as an event, but it does need to live up to the hype and perhaps a
bit beyond the normal hype. The issue is that there tend to be multiple events
that would have been better contained to a standard storyline, but there are
dozens of characters shoehorned into the story t maintain the illusion of said
comic book event seeming more special than it really is, in addition to the tie
in books and everything. Granted, that has always been a problem, trying to
figure out all of the tie in books. Spider-Man often seems to be the prime
offender of in recent history of milking a storyline beyond what it should be,
but his book is far from the only main offender. Oh boy, far from it. Or as I
liked to call it, “how many more bloody X-Men books do we need a month”
syndrome.
Needless to say, one may realize
that not as many customers now than in previous years are going to part with
four dollars for a single issue of a comic book. Especially casual comic book
readers, even if such an animal does exist these days with all of the hoops
that you have to jump through to get into comic books. But diehard fans as
well. A lot of the diehard comic book fans will decide to wait for the trade
paperback and thus you got writers and editors and everything else trying to
connect all of the story elements together. Stand alone stories are an element
of comic book reading that are making themselves scarce. There is much of decompressed
story occurring going on in comic books, to the point where it is being drawn
out way too much. There is something to be said about drawing out a good comic
book storyline but there are also times where there is something to be said
about getting to the freaking point and telling a cool self contained story in
twenty two or however many pages.
In the immortal words of Stan
Lee, every comic could be someone’s very first issue. I can just imagine some
young comic book readers clueless when as they thrown into like approximately
issue three of eight of a big event comic book. The Internet does help some,
providing someone on there can figure out what’s going on.
