The Four Color Media Monitor

On the Independent Review blog in Minnesota*, one contributor makes an important point about the increasing number of company wide crossovers (via The Beat blog):

Like I've said in my last blog, I am an avid comic book reader, and I am beginning to notice a disturbing trend in the "big two"(DC Comics and Marvel Comics), and that is an overload of crossover events. Simply put, a crossover event is something that brings characters from many different titles together, which usually involves the universe collapsing on itself.

[...]

I don’t have a problem with "Crisis on Infinite Earths" or its recent sequel "Infinite Crisis", but I do have a problem with continued crisis' like DC's new weekly comic book "Countdown" (another name that has been showing up a lot lately). These books make it sound like readers are only interested when the entire universe is about to collapse.

He's right, there's been far too many crossovers lately, and it's hurt a lot of chances for anyone to write a story with genuine developments, as the writers otherwise don't have the freedom for it. And should we the audience really only be interested in when the universe is about to crash, and not in smaller, simpler stories that involve bank robberies, something that's been considerably lacking in comic books of recent?

* Strangely enough, this entry vanished from the main blog soon after it was posted, and I had to look for it on the Google cache.

Labels: crossoverloading, dc comics, marvel comics