This Week In Rant for 8/17/11: Full Of Itself

This week, the subject that permeated most of  my pull was: Event Fatigue.

I've never been a huge fan of events from the Big Two. They have their place in concept, but they've grown into these massive beasts that take up most of a year's comics, and whose fallout will pervade a good number of titles  for the rest of the year, until the next event rises up. The old mantra "nothing will never be the same" is only true thanks to the fact that this flow and ebb never lets up long enough for something to settle and stay the same, as room must be made for the new status quos, the dying-for-sales characters or the reality-altering time-quakes.
To DC's credit, not a whole lot will be the same after this current event wraps up. Flashpoint is being used to usher in the new DCU, which is a fine idea in itself, but the odd part is proving to be how insular the various Flashpoint series have been, mostly being stand-alone mini-series and one-shots. While the majority of DC's books are, within the narrative, not being affected by the goings-on in Flashpoint, they are contradictably being affected in the real world with their being relaunched or cancelled to make room for the fresh-and-shiny continuity being moved in. It's not a new point to bring up, certainly, and I am excited about a great deal of the new books, but it's hard to forget what's being left in the wake. All problems with the story of the book aside, Flashpoint is, in a lot of ways, a very good example of how to handle an event, providing a mostly-contained story without permeating other books and disrupting their rhythm, as is often the case with an ongoing title's event tie-in. However, at the same time it is the current DCU's death-knell, a tool to hew out this new continuity. While the event itself has been mostly contained to its own titles, with the rest of the books ending every week (some for good for the time being), every title becomes intrisically tied to the fallout of Flashpoint, for better or worse, and in a major way. And a lot of the books' stories have been forced to rush and alter plots to wrap them up, if not because of the event then because they simply won't have another chance to do so. As I focused on last week, every Wednesday we're saying good-bye to something because of this event, even if Flashpoint itself is just a puppet for this greater mandate.

A bit on the nose, there.

Marvel, on the other hand, is doing a pretty terrible job organizing their events. And I have to emphasize the plural there, we are now dealing with multiple crossover events. We are smack in the middle of Fear Itself, which currently has the entire world panicking as the Serpent and his Worthy are at the height of their powers,  with the heroes of Earth coming together to stop this seemingly-omnipotent, existence-wide threat. Meanwhile, New York is infested with normal citizens possessing spider powers and the X-Men are battling a global Sentinel threat and a reformed Hellfire club, neither of which seem to be showing any signs of being in the midst of or on the far side of the events of Fear Itself. The main draw we keep coming back to these events for, whether we like it or not, is to see the effect they're going to have on the shared continuity, and it becomes hard to take this kind of thing seriously when said shared continuity is going to pick and choose what it's going to observe. It wouldn't be such a problem if, like Flashpoint, the events themselves were more insular and/or staggered out a little better. A large part of the event fatigue is the sheer amount of books I'm getting devoted to them. Out of eleven Marvel books I picked up this week, one was the Schism main title (which also had a Generation Hope tie-in come out), two were Spider-Island tie-ins and five were Fear Itself tie-ins. Of the three remaining books, one is just getting out of its Fear Itself arc that, for all intents and purposes, could have missed those two issues and not missed a beat. Specifically, I'm talking about Hulk which, while one of the issues was pretty fun and I can't fault it for that, had to take a break from the story in progress for two issues to inconsequentially check in on how Fear Itself was doing.
This is admittedly a bad week to just complain, however, since even if it did throw a wrench into their intended plotworks, Uncanny X-Men and Thunderbolts both put out some great issues for their tie-ins and Deadpool and Fearsome Four were both fun issues that need Fear Itself to exist in the first place, while Journey Into Mystery has been one of the standouts of the Fear Itself crop since Gillen started his run alongside the event. Both Venom and Spider-Girl's Spider-Island books were very strong, as was Cloak and Dagger's first issue last week. And I have some small problems with Schism, but the good far outweighs the bad and I'm enjoying the series quite a bit more than even I expected to. At any given point in an event, you can take things book by book and find some great comics, almost by law of averages, and the problem isn't one of quality. The problem, in the end, comes to primarily to timing and volume. We are given the core Event series and it's closer tie-in mini-series. Then that spins out into the ongoing series touched by the event. As those move on, series have to move on and they fall off the main event and, in the case we're currently seeing, spinning out into their own, smaller events. However, that first event is still going, and as the initial minis start to dry up, we start getting the "impact" series and one-shots (which I think Fear Itself has been mostly free from but I remember Civil War absolutely drowning in). Eventually, the series ends and the fallout books start coming out, which today Marvel announced for Fear Itself, including Fear Itself getting issues 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 among other titles, and surely some of the ongoings will swing back around and comment on what happened, now the the world has been forever changed somehow until sales dictate it returns to normal. And between inevitable delays, shipping issues, etc, by the time we've actually gotten past this event, we'll probably be seeing the prelude books for next year's event getting solicits. When all's said and done, we'll have seen a seven-issue series spawn damn near a hundred individual issues, and the wheel keeps turning. This is probably the best thing about the DC relaunch, that they're giving themselves to break that cycle and start fresh, even though we'll still have to wait and see if they seize that opportunity. Marvel, on the other hand, seemed to have taken a bit of a breather with the whole Heroic Age movement, but it looks like it's headed right back down the event-hole, remaining mired deep down as the tentacles cancerously spread through their titles without reprieve.

Ah well. There's always Image.