Crossover Events. Part 1

Put enough socially inept and awkward teenagers in a room together and sometime before the largest of the children begins picking off the weaker ones for sustenance once the Captain Crunch is all gone, you’ll probably hear a “Vs” debate.

Versus debates are not difficult to pick up on, they usually begin with, “Who would win in a fight, blank or *missing value*” or “Dude, you are so stupid. Everyone knows so-and-so would trounce all over Captain Warble Nuts”. Once you’ve heard something along these lines, it’s best to walk slowly away being sure not to make eye contact with anyone involved in the conversation unless you want to be mistaken for someone who gives two rips about this masturbatory nonsense and accidentally get roped in.

In my youth even I have engaged in these arguments but quickly dodged out as an adult once I realized how silly it all is. Don’t for a second let some burger flipping youth convince you that either logic or science can be applied to these things. Despite not having laser vision there are a handful of people in this world who will try to make the claim that Genghis Khan could actually take Abraham Lincoln in a fair fight. Pashaw, I say!

A long time ago the editors over at Marvel and DC discovered just how feverish these feuds are and calculated a plan to make money out of it; and not the “let’s do good deeds for the people and turn a profit as an unforeseen byproduct” sort of way, but the “holy shit, can you believe these people are that brick faced retarded” art of asshole business. While spurious company rivalries are pretty good at keeping faces glued to newspaper print, crossover events are even better. Nothing gets a comic geek’s nethers wetter than the thought of having Batman and Superman team up, except for maybe authentic Aquaman Speedo tighties.

This is a rather clever marketing technique and it seems to have worked well for the two major corporate juggernauts over the years. Even my most cerebral studies get kicked to the curb like some poor misfortunate MIT graduate going through an Urban street gang hazing, when I see the prospects of Namor and Hawkeye teaming up to battle shape-shifting alien Skrulls. On a personal level, these “professional grade fan fictions” will get me reading them just to see if I can’t decipher on what page and panel number the lobotomy began.

But as I said before (and if not, I’m sorry), crossover events to me are just stupid. Sure there are a few that are good (key word good, not GREAT), but most of them are a complete waste of time. You might as well just go out to the forest and burn down the trees rather than having to go through this whole dog and pony show just to slim them down, dress them up in cheap prostitute inks, and wrap them in Mylar bags to protect them from Cheetos powder. Although explaining my hatred on a more technical level might help illustrate what I find so bewildering.

The writer of Superman is usually a different person from the man at DC comics who is writing Batman; in fact most of the superhero books are being made by so many different teams of artists/writers/letterers/inkers/colorists/editors that its befuddling to even imagine how any one person can pin this all down and draw a narrative thread connecting them all. Usually there is some fancy pants talking head at the top of this chain of command referred to as “editor and chief” which is another fine way of saying “man who sucked his way to the top”. Those who don’t believe me need only look in the direction of Joe Quesada.

What complicates this whole matter even more is within the single Superman story line you have a character that has been written by dozens upon dozens of writers spanning several decades. The madness steps a few inches deeper into lunacy when you have to whip out the Texas-instruments calculator to add up all the tangent universes, multiply by what-ifs, and divide by “oops we’re sorry, have a lollipop” retcons to even write a bare bones Superman plot. Then all of a sudden some whore at the top office in your corporate building comes down wearing a suit of money and says, “Yeah this is great and all, but I want all of you writers to go ahead and cram all of your ideas into one clown car and drive it right up the ass of all the fanboys. And if they don’t believe us, add in some editorials at the end of each comic we publish a few months before the crossover begins and be sure to reference minute details from old comics to build the illusion that we had this planned all along.” Surprise, surprise, this gamble usually pays off.

Now the key word I just used in that last paragraph was retcon, because retcon is the magical word that makes everything all right. No matter how shit for brains upside down all of the storytelling can get, comic companies can always press the reset button and see if they can’t find Princess Peach’s tasty golden locks in another castle of experimentation. So long as they get their money the companies will do their best to weed out the bad, cement the good, and leave all the fans so confused that they may end up getting their wires crossed and go off cosplaying as the Green Goblin wearing the Iron Man suit painted up in Captain America colors – no, that would just be stupid.