The Event to End All Events! Or, is it? Dun dun DUN!

Coming up in April 2012 is Marvel's latest event to rock their superhero-ridden lines: AVENGERS VERSUS X-MEN! Who will win control of the power of the Phoenix? Will Jean Grey return? (Please, no.) And, more importantly, which heroes are scheduled to beat the tar out of each other as they race towards whatever epic conclusion Marvels promises WILL CHANGE THEIR WORLD FOREVEEEEEEEER!!!

If I sound a little snide about this whole proposal, it might be because I suffer from what I like to call "Comics Event Fatigue," or CEF, for short. It hit me around the time DC geared up for the mega event that was Superman abandoning Earth in order to infiltrate the planet his fellow Kryptonians were building just the other side of the moon. That event dragged on for months in 2009, starting with "World of New Krypton," spinning into "World Without A Superman," and culminating in a "War of the Supermen" that effectively killed off the entire supporting cast of Kryptonians that had caused the whole mess in the first place, including Clark Kent's adopted super-son Chris and his compatriot Mon-El, who had both gotten books out of the event. Useless books, given that the characters weren't given the chance to stick around and develop further in a forever-changed world with Supermen flying around. Of course, the world didn't change forever, since everyone important to changing that world died except for Superman, who'll never go anywhere, despite the current loss of his red under-trunks. And frankly, given all the brou-ha-ha over this titles-sweeping plot, at the end of the day, few of the individual books involving the event were stellar, and a loss of money, according to most Super-fans.

So no wonder I'm tired, right? Event comics because they drain my bank account and rarely deliver on what they promise. There are exceptions to that claim, however. I thought the entirety of DC's "Blackest Night"/Green Lantern zombie fest was a pretty rad and well-handled saga (even if it brought back dead white guys in favor of booting their minority successors out of leading roles, but that's a topic for another day). I also love anything involving Gotham cops and how their ordinary lives butt up against their shadowy protectors' extraordinary ones, so book-sprawling stories like "Officer Down" and "Batman: No Man's Land" are built to appeal to me.

My top favorite event storyline grew out of Marvel's "Civil War," which centered on a fight between Captain America and Iron Man over superhero registration with the federal government. That fight led to Cap's arrest and death (psych!) and generated "The Initiative," a series of books about the new teams of superheroes being trained by the government to fight crime across America's fifty states. Not only did that event freshen things up because it added new, young voices to the mix, it led seamlessly into Marvel's next event, during which alien Skrull invaders took over positions of power while masquerading as all sorts of heroes from the Marvel line. In a couple of giant leaps, Marvel was able to take all the paranoia and political confusion of the early 2000s and distill it into a rollicking superhero epic that actually had long-term effects on its characters, some of which are still being felt. (Main case in point: Jessica Drew and Tony Stark; I'd tell you why, but SPOILERS, and you should just read "Civil War" and "The Initiative," if you haven't already.)



So how does my beef with wasted storytelling opportunities relate to the main focus of this blog, i.e., how comics relate to and reflect everyday life. I guess the proof might be in the pictures. Way at the top of this post, you can find the poster for "Avengers Versus the X-Men." Below this text, you can see one of the main images released during "Civil War":

Granted, in this picture, heroes are simply squaring off, not duking it out, full-throttle. But there's enough similarities in the placement of the two groups in this poster and the "AvX" example -- one team versus the other, us versus them -- that it gives me pause as a comics enthusiast. (Actually, take a look at the other pictures in this post, i.e., the side-by-side renditions of Cap or Iron Man and company; outside of media blitz alone, would you be able to tell which was a poster for "Civil War" and which was for "The Initiative"? I'm not sure I would. Good thing there's a title under the "Avengers Versus X-Men" pic, amirite?)

It's not just a matter of, "Oh, gee, who's getting in a fight now, and why should I care about it when I can clearly find other issues where even epic-er battle royales have taken place?" (Although that is a hang-up for me.) A larger point to take away might be this: What does it say about our society -- or the comics medium -- that popular stories can't be found in anything other than our heroes fighting each other, friends and family (as zombies), or themselves?

How do DC and Marvel know that the average comic buyer will tolerate, even embrace, the retread of "my friend is my enemy" plotline over and over? "Blackest Night" made beaucoup de bucks for DC, and "Civil War" is regarded as seminal storytelling by most fans (me, included). So where does the CEF come in? For me, it comes in when I'm forced to watch "The Initiative" turn into "Dark Reign" (where Spidey bad guy Norman Osborn takes over the government-run superheroes), which turns into "The Heroic Age" (where things are generally okay, I guess?), which turns into "Fear Itself" (where SPOILERS: Thor dies), just so everything can go to hell in a handbasket in "Avengers Versus X-men." It's exhausting, riding those waves, financially and dramatically. Especially when you know a more intimate story in an individual book might get sidelined in favor of continuing the twisting story that will CHANGE THE STATUS QUO FOREVER ... until the next event roars over the horizon.

I think event comics, by and large, are perhaps more ambitious in scale than they should be. Rather than watching characters make organic choices that directly affect them, readers are forced to watch their favorite folk try to punch Captain America or get possessed by a demon and kill their worst enemy (so they won't be culpable when they regain themselves; woot, Daredevil!). And what room for the audience lies in all of that perfectly positioned sturm and drang? Are the artists at these companies actually invested in these big storylines, or are all of these events meant to generate buzz and sales and have little impact on the heroes or their readers?

If I knew, I'd have a job editing comics and a buncha awards, I imagine. But my CEF gives me the sneaking suspicion that superhero comics could tell much more important stories than they often end up telling; I'm not saying we need to overtly reference social justice in every book, as was certainly done in the 1970s Green Arrow/Green Lantern series, or allow Superman to solve the crisis in the Middle East, as was done in early 2011. I'm just saying: wouldn't it be more daring for these books to touch the ground and give their protagonists something to fight for, rather than against each other? There's a lot of fighting going on in the U.S. every day. Why shouldn't our creations engage with that on a more than superficial level? After all, "Civil War" did, and the results were thought-provoking, even as they maybe spawned Marvel's reliance on event books as a whole.

Sidebar:

I never really gave my final opinion on DC's reboot. By now, it's pretty obvious the folks at DC rushed into creating the New 52, or the DCnu, as it was first termed. But what's great, remains great: Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Wonder Woman, Batman. What started beautifully drawn, remains beautifully drawn: The Flash, Batwoman. What started solid, remains solid: Action Comics, Nightwing, Supergirl, The Huntress. What started inconsistent or playing it safe, remains inconsistent or playing it safe: Superman, Batgirl, Justice League. What started atrociously sexist, still seems to be unapologetic about its first issues: Catwoman, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Vodoo.

But I have my guesses on how long all of this will last before it's turned over for the next big thing. Clues in each comic give the impression we have a loophole out of this universe, but also: compare these publicity pictures; they say a thousand words.

How is this ...

... any different from this, at the end of the day?

Free Comic Book Day And Its Pitfalls

-A guest post by Nick Philpott-

Ever since I was young, I've been what some would call a voracious reader and what some others would call a total dork. I learned to read early, and basically devoured whatever I could. Usually my choice of book was entirely dependent on the cover art (a lot of judging books by their covers, har har), which led me to reading a lot of somewhat lurid fiction, which probably wasn't enitely appropriate for a kid my age.

Most of the blame for that falls squarely on R.L. Stine's shoulders, because I read his adult novel, Superstition, thinking it would be like a really scary Goosebumps book. It wasn't. It was the first book I ever read with the word "masturbation" in it, and led therefore to the first of many awkward conversations with my parents as the result of reading books which were at my reading level but not necessarily my life level.

Oddly, comics books didn't really appeal to me until I was freshman in high school, even though they had some of the best cover art. I think part of it was the idea that comics only came one at a time and the stories never truly finished. Half the fun of reading, for me, is seeing the story wrap itself up, tie a bow, and finish itself off. But one day, a capricious trip to my library's Teens section yielded a new result: the graphic novel. Somewhat shockingly, my local library in suburban Cincinnati (such a small branch that it fit comfortably into a strip mall, right next to an Ace Hardware) was well-stocked with comic books, running the gamut from the entire Dragonball magna to single issues to the collected landmark series, such as The Dark Knight Returns and Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Being an awkward, unathletic teenager with no real goals in life, The Dark Knight Returns appealed to me on a gut level because Batman was everything I wasn't: focused, driven to a singular goal, and athletic as shit, not to mention had a hefty bit of Bruce Wayne swag and could have gotten all the ladies. I went home that afternoon and devoured the sucker. I think I skipped dinner, which is unusual, because if there's one thing I love, it's dinner. Now that I knew that comics could tell self-contained stories, I couldn't get enough of them. I read all of the graphic novels, the collected editions and whathaveyous I could get my hands on from the library. It didn't matter what it was, I'd read it.

Shortly thereafter, I saw on AOL's homepage (if that doesn't date me a bit, nothing will) that there was this magical day in May called Free Comic Book Day. I loved comic books! I loved free things! I loved days! What could be better?? So I dragged my friends to our local comic book store (Queen City Comics and Cards, which I'm convinced is the only comic book store in the Greater Cincinnati area, right across from the best record store in town, Everybody's) with promises of free issues of whatever comics they wanted, and hell, maybe I'd buy something, just for laughs.

And then we saw the selection of books.

Free Comic Book Day is a horrendously obvious marketing tool for the industry in general, but we let them get away with it because, God bless 'em, at least they're trying. They give away a free comic book to anyone who wants one as a sort of gateway drug into the Scarface mound of cocaine that is the comic book world. As a friend of mine once put it, "Oh, so it's like with coke, where the first one they give you is a real good batch to get you hooked and coming back for the stuff cut with milk powder." Yes. Yes, it's exactly like that, except for one difference: the first one is almost all milk powder.

All the books on Free Comic Book Day, in my experience, fall into one of several categories:

Issue 0's: As a backhanded way of trying to get you involved in reading a company-wide crossover and get some of the exposition out of the way, a lot of "Issue 0's" get handed out on FCBD (I'm tired of typing that all out, forgive the abbreviation). The most recent example that comes to mind was Issue 0 of DC's Blackest Night, a crossover centered around the Green Lantern Corps, which is making a comeback in a big way, and has been for several years now. I think I can safely say that it was an entirely unnecessary issue that was basically just the Flash (Barry Allen) and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) standing around, talking about death. It was interesting as a Platonic dialogue between two people have died before about the nature of death and the loss of friends, but it didn't move the story until the last page, when the Black Lantern showed up; basically a whole sequence that was repeated at the beginning of Issue #1 of Blackest Night. Nothing about the issue gave me a sense of urgency, of needing to read Blackest Night immediately when it hit the stands. I'm pretty sure Blackest Night started in the summer of 2009 and I didn't read it until the collected hardcover came out, which was something like winter of 2010/2011.

Reprint collections: There's usually at least one comic that's a couple old EC horror comic stories that have been reprinted with new color and whathaveyou. They're satisfying stand-alone stories, and the new color is always nice, but they're rarely the pick of the litter. I mean, I love those old horror comics, and God knows I love Creepshow, but honestly, if it's either that or an Issue 0, I'm gonna go with the Issue 0, because I don't know what's in it. It's like on Let's Make A Deal: You can either have the sweet new guitar that you've already got, or you can open the mystery door and possibly get a bitchin' new car. Unfortunately, in this scenario, usually there's a heaping pile behind the mystery door.

Dark Horse: Dark Horse is one of the few comic publishers that I think gets it right every year on FCBD. Their offering is usually something Mike Mignola-related, be it a Hellboy story (which are always fairly stand-alone to start with) or a random short that Mike cranks out, plus, they usually have something Star Wars, which is always nice. I'd venture to say that Hellboy and Star Wars are Dark Horse's two biggest properties, so it's sort of like if DC and Marvel would ball up and put a Batman, a Superman, a Spiderman and an Avengers title on the shelf. For free.

Not enough books: This isn't a kind of book, but the past couple years, I've gotten to the comic book store and they've been out of free comics, which means people even took the weird outlier books from Top Cow and whatnot. I don't know if that's the fault of whoever runs the store because they didn't order enough, or if that's even how it works, so let's not place blame for this one, we'll just say it's an unfortunate reality and we'll move along.

Alright, we've made it this far, here's where I finally deduce the problem. I feel like Free Comic Book Day is going about its marketing in a wholly wrong way, which could be extrapolated to the industry as a whole (but that's an entirely different essay). They're offering a free product to supposedly an untapped market of non-readers, but because they're offering sub-par material, they're not getting the readers they should be. There is a scummy undertone to this whole affair, where you can essentially smell the fear of the companies that they are losing a profit for a whole day.

My admonition to the industry as a whole is this: You're multi-billion companies. You put out movies that make staggering amounts of money, like, feed-a-third-world-country-for-years money, and that's not even counting the cash cows like Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Would it kill you to put some A-list talent to good use and have someone write a free comic book that would just knock it out of the park? If you want people to know what they're missing, you have to give them what they're missing. You need to get Grant Morrison to just unleash himself on a single issue, get Tim Sale to draw something rad, I don't know, SOMETHING.

But until that happens, I'll still be in line on FCBD this May, waiting for my milk powder.