What's Wrong with Event Books?

Nothing...generally.

There is a very good interview w/ Joe Casey on the wordballoon podcast where they kind of delve into things from a perspective that I, as a reader, appreciated. Yeah, we can all be cynical about the mid-90s, but let's face it, that's when a lot of the readers of my generation started picking up books w/ some regularity (albeit in secret). Casey makes a good point: he's seen it all before. When Joe Quesada, & alternately Dan Didio at DC, came into the Marvel offices as EIC, there was an edict passed down that there were going to be no more big "events" in the Marvel Universe. Several years later, we've been travelling down the road to Civil War for a very long time. But when you listen to the writers involved in masterminding these giant cross-overs, their intent is to trick the untrained reader into thinking that they've had these storylines planned from day one in some grand Moore meets Machiavelli plan. They want you to think they're that good. & you know what? They are. Because they didn't do it that way. But the fact that it could be easily misconstrued that Brian Bendis has been forming a secret coupe w/ Mark Millar to bring about the fall of America's greatest hero, as opposed to the truth, which is that Joe Quesada locked all the "hot" writers in a room together & deprived them of food, water, & internet access until they turned this baby out. Same thing for DC of course. Of course the germs of these stories had been planted long, long ago by the individual writers, but no one knew the exact form & shape that they would take on until the deadline was set. But it sure has been one hell of a ride for the loyal fans of the big 2 hasn't it?

One of the best points Casey brought up came from reading the recently published memos & notes from the "Absolute Crisis" hardcover. Marv Wolfman states, over & over again, because people don't seem to listen the first time, that he conceived the story entirely himself on a train ride to a convention & pitched to the DC editors when he got there. I don't believe for a second that he's lying. But when you look at the work that was put into it, you can see what it takes to pull one of the puppies off. It wasn't conceived as a company-wide revision to make their characters more marketable. It wasn't a way to pull in new readers. It was just a story. Written by one man, who happens to have planned, & planned, & planned, & planned, until he was given the official "death list" by the DC editors. The reason so many of the headaches like "Eclipso" or the "Phalanx Saga" don't work, is because no one bothers to do their homework. Caey read the memos & saw the planning put into Crisis on Infinite Earths & shouted, "Yeah! Now that's how you fucking do it!" Still, he remains on the side-lines watching the Civil War wheels turn, content to not be involved, because he's seen it all before.

I don't understand what the big deal is. Several of my comic book geek friends have remarked to me some level of relief matched w/ equal amounts of uneasiness about the ending of Infinite Crisis. Some have suggested that they may not buy comics anymore. At the New York ComiCon, one audience member of the DC Crsis Counseling panel asked when things were going to calm down. "Calm down! I hope they never calm down!" yelled Dan Didio at the top of his lungs -- which he really didn't need to do, since he was standing right in front of a microphone, which coupled w/ his screaming caused a huge rush of clipping & feedback through the rooms PA that unsettled all of us in the audience even more than the fact that there are no plans to bring back Barry Allen. I personally, don't want things to calm down in the world of comic books. I don't want to go back to the comic book store every Wednesday & look at the shelves realizing that there's nothing for me to buy except zombie comic books, as much as I love them, & maybe the occassional Seth graphic novel. Righ before the Infinite Crisis ball started really rolling I had gotten back into mainstream superhero comics. For years I bought only indie books trying to justify my love of the medium while trying not to acknowledge that my love stemmed from a fascination at an early age w/ a bunch of underwear perverts solving their problems w/ violence on a globally devastating scale. That stopped when I got out of the hospital & realized that I didn't have time to waste on pretending to not love the things I love. & this is what I love. Soap operas in spandex.

What's the difference between a single issue of the Brave & the Bold & Crisis on Infinite Earths, save for a few hundred other characters being referenced that you need to Wikipedia per page? All an "event" book is is a massively obnoxious & expensive crossover. Hell yeah I'd pay that amount of money for the first meeting of the two Flashes or the first meeting of the JLA & JSA. Those are great stories! That's where it started. You like Runaways? Well maybe you'd like Young Avengers. Let's put out a mini-series, tying into Civil War to get people to check out both teams & possibly their individual books afterwards. These are great characters. Maybe you don't know it. But writer knows it. That's why he's putting them in a book w/ yr favorite character & that buxom babe you wished you could have lost yr virginity to instead of that other girl. That's the great thing about a cross-over, it's just an excuse to write a new story. I think that the biggest problem w/ the mid-90s period of one cross-over on top of another is that the writers forgot that there are other reasons to write a good story about people in underwear punching each other. It's the kind of logic that only happens in this particular genre. You don't see the zombies from Walking Dead eating the people in Escape of the Living Dead, do you? No. Someone did it first. Gardner Fox. The rest followed suit & for a period of time forgot how to do otherwise. Today, the worst of the mainstream drivel is better than it ever has been in years. I have faith in my writers. I think that they've learned their lesson & that this sudden burst of event-oriented marketing is something that will pass for a period of time until a few more years down the road when it would be appropriate to tell another cross-over, company wide story. You got to keep believing. I mean, that is the reason Superman & Wonder Woman of Earth-1 keep fighting isn't it?