The Four Color Media Monitor

In this article on Salon.Com's book section by Douglas Wolk (via Backwards City), which talks about "events" and crossovers, he says at the end:

Well, he's right, sometimes. God knows there's plenty of cynical, awful superhero products packing comics stores' clearance bins, and some of the worst offenders are "event" comics and crossovers. So why do people keep buying them? Because when they're good, their charge of fantastic invention is like nothing else -- a well-executed crossover offers a sense not only of experiencing a crucial moment in a huge, fictional history but of being able to understand the meaning of that moment by seeing it through multiple artists' (or characters') eyes. And, at their best, they give even the terrible comics that came before them meaning and value, as unreliable but irreplaceable documents of a world whose wonders are only more colorful versions of our own world's.

Well, it's a well-meaning argument, but I'd say it has partly what to do with the still prevailing addiction to comics that many readers still seem to have difficulty in shaking. Nevertheless, this shows perfectly why I won't be buying any more company wide crossovers. They're likely to be the most weakly written, and, as evidenced by Secret Wars II, they tend to be the most likely to drag down the quality of any individual book that gets caught up in the vortex. And they're exactly what anyone part of the comics audience should avoid, certainly any miniseries that connects disperses the dots.

If readers were to vote no to crossovers by not buying any of them, that would send a message to DC and Marvel that we don't approve of them, certainly not if they involve story elements as crude as those in Identity Crisis, and then crossovers would begin to decrease and fade out altogether. The same goes for "event" comics.

I therefore urge everyone - do yourselves and your wallets a favor by not getting tricked into buying a crossover/event comic miniseries, certainly not if it's in bad taste.

Labels: crossoverloading, msm propaganda