Every year DC and Marvel come out with some colossal, world-shattering event to shake things up in each company's fictional universe. I haven't really been into DC's events but I did follow Marvel's over the last few years. I was there for House of M, Civil War, and World War Hulk. This year Marvel's big event is Secret Invasion. DC's is Final Crisis. Brian Bendis is handling Secret Invasion while Grant Morrison is doing Final Crisis. Despite the fact that both men are award winning writers, I just don't care. I've had it with big events in comics.My lack of interest in huge events probably stems from the having following three years of Marvel events. I admit that I did enjoy House of M, though I think I can see why the words "No more mutants" would peeve quiet a bit of fans of the X-books.
Civil War as another one I got a kick out of. In all honesty, I do believe that if we had super heroes in our own world, they probably wouldn't be allowed to run around like lose canons. Yeah, the conclusion of Civil War may have sucked, but it was nice to see the super hero community split right down the middle and the aftermath of this event can still be felt and seen in the comics to this day.
World War Hulk was basically and old-fashioned super hero brawl, but the Hulk lost sympathy points from me when his actions made him out to be a villain after the third or fourth issue. Marvel EIC, Joe Q also said WWH was going to "rival Civil War in impact." I was skeptical of this at the time I'd read those words and upon seeing the results, I know now that Joe Q was talking out of his butt, hyping up the company's big event. Rick Jones was left in critical condition at the story's end and there was a lot of damage done to New York (just another typical day there), but near as I can tell WWH has done little to shake up the Marvel world the way the previous events did.
With Secret Invasion everyone will be playing the guessing game to find out who is a Skrull. Lately the little aliens have been popping up all over, strutting around like they own the place. If Black Bolt and Elektra turned out to be Skrulls who else could be walking among the Avengers, X-men, Fantastic Four pretending to be an ally when they've really been plotting against them all along? It actually isn't a bad concept, but it's also grounds for the biggest retcon device ever, which could lead to some of the stupidest story-telling and explanations this side of One More Day. I've seen the checklist for tie-ins for this event and if you want to know everything that's going on, you'd better be prepared to shell out when this event kicks off.Final Crisis. You know what happened the last time DC had a Crisis? Some villain got a nasty case of PMS, punched reality and Jason Todd got resurrected. Oh yeah, and some other stuff got screwed up. Think about that for a moment: Superboy Prime punched reality and dead people come back. To paraphrase one of my fellow forumites at the shorkyuken.com forums, "He gave that girl a black eye."
To be fair, I've never read Infinite Crisis but I've heard enough that I have no interest in reading it. The same goes for 52. I've heard enough to get headaches when people talk about the convoluted things that have taken place in these events. This really is the type of thing that has kept me from getting into a lot of DC books. It doesn't help DC's case much when the company feels the need to drop event bombs on an almost weekly basis.
I don't mind mind-blowing events from time-to-time but this once a year thing has really gotten stale. Does a comic company's entire universal foundation have to be shaken each year in the attempt to tell a good story, or fix things that some may have felt were wrecked? I don't think so, but then, I'm not the big wig behind a huge comic company so what do I know? Oh and if you think this is DC's "Final" Crisis... PAHAHAAHAHAAHHAAAAHAAA!!!
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