Good Crossovers

I recently posted about war of kings, and I’d like to take a specific point form this. That point is how to run an event, specifically crossovers.

Marvel has been picking up some bad habits of late, namely the multi-title crossover, where the crossover runs through alternate issues of different titles. It can be done well, such as, in my opinion, The Hands of the mandarin crossover between Iron Man, War Machine and Force Works in the 90s. The titles were pretty closely linked and we had guest appearances quite often (And indeed at one point War Machine finished his story and put in a call to Force Works to take over), second Iron man was part of Force Works anyway and the issues were written so the Iron Man issues were Iron man Centred, War machine focused more on War Machine and so on, they all told the story and all featured the others, but it meant you weren’t picking up an issue of Force Works and wondering why War Machine was so prominent. Similarly, while I wasn’t keen the Peter David penned X-Factor/She Hulk crossover was annoying but at least the She-Hunk issues were mostly she-hulk.

Anyway, I digress. I generally hate this sort of crossover, it adds another title that I don’t want to buy, (Utopia X) or it pulls characters from their interesting ongoing plot to a pointless crossover (Magnum opus).

Marvel has managed to occasionally pull some really good crossovers. This is because to me, good crossovers are more like tie-ins. Take War of Kings (Although both Annihilation events showed the same restraint) so, on the face of it, you have what should be a tie in nightmare, 5 issue Limited series, with the Darkhawk/Ascension tie ins, the Kingbreaker prelude and tie ins from Guardians of the Galaxy and Nova. However, restraint was shown. Nova focused more on the Nova Corps battling the criminal imperial guard we saw assembled in Kingbreaker, however you didn’t need kingbreaker to let you know the status quo, Nova handled that. Similarly the Guardians of the Galaxy are involved with trying to stop the war, helping Liandra reach Shi-Ar space and stopping the spread of the tear, but this is contained perfectly in their own title. The best example is Ascension, where several things that tie in elsewhere happen, but none require the reading of ascension to understand. Why did Darkhawk assassinate Liandra? Read ascension for the why, but it has no real bearing on the War of Kings plot. Why is Blastaar suddenly in possession of the cosmic rod, again in Ascension, but it’s not a vital plot point.

This has not been contained to just the cosmic stuff though. The Initiative recently invaded the 42 prison facility which was taken over by Blastaar in GotG. All you needed to be told was the prison had fallen and needed to be taken back.

Finally we see this seep through to what is fast becoming one of the more bloated events this year Dark Reign. In thunderbolts we see Nick Fury gunned down, only at the end for fixer to reveal he was an LMD. There is an aside saying “For more see Secret Warriors” and sure enough we do, in secret warriors we find out that the escape was partially orchestrated by the secret warriors, and indeed that the LMD was piloted by Phobos, son of Ares. This leads to some resolution between Ares and Nick Fury which may have bearing on Ares actions in Dark Reign – The List: Secret Warriors, where he secures fury’s escape from avengers tower. This I like, you can follow extra plot threads if you like, but your reading experience isn’t ruined if you don’t follow up. Of course, marketing don’t like that because it doesn’t directly force someone to buy another comic, but I wonder, does this method generate more readers in the long run, will curiosity draw in readers where forcing turns them of?