The Four Color Media Monitor

The Vidette, student paper of Illinois University, has a puff piece about franchises from different companies crossing over in comics format, coming long after the potential was soured by PC advocates:

As someone who is a huge fan of various properties in pop culture, I always have the occasional thought that it would be cool for certain universes to crossover with one another.

It’s similar to kids making up crazy scenarios with their action figures. Crossovers are not exactly common in the realms of film and television; they occur once in a blue moon.

Have you ever wanted to see Godzilla take on the Power Rangers or to have Batman take on the likes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Comic books make otherwise impossible scenarios come true. Words would not be able to explain how these crossovers bring out my inner child.

Yes, but only if they're done for entertainment value, a prime ingredient now lacking. And it's not so that crossovers on TV never happened. What about 77 Sunset Strip, Bourbon Street Beat, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside 6? As early examples of detective series, they had some of the actors crossing between series. So too did Cannon and Barnaby Jones in the 1970s, and Magnum PI crossed over with Simon & Simon and Murder, She Wrote in the 1980s. I think some actors from Baywatch even crossed over in an episode of Pacific Blue in the 1990s. And there have been more examples of crossovers and/or guest appearances since, so that makes yet another college paper writer who just can't his/her facts straight.

But that told, I'm not particularly desperate to see Batman cross over with TMNT, and today's crossovers hardly seem written up for entertainment value, but rather, just to make it sound it's such a big deal alone that heroes from different franchises would meet up in a "crossover" project. Not because there's merit in the completed story. And then the writer brings up this rather useless claim:

Sonic is faster than the Flash by the way (totally not being biased or coping).

In the story, or because the columnist thinks this is what should be? Or, because the comic's writer believes Sonic should be faster, simply because he wrote it being so? Ridiculous.

Dreams really do come true. Comic books turn those dreams into reality.

I wish that more media would take part in making crossovers happen. How could you not? I get that licensing and stuff are a thing, but there is so much money that these companies could be making.

Obviously, there's copyright problems in being able to do this, but seriously, if we consider the track record of some of the publishers in the past 20 years, it's clear merit can be called into question, because that's hardly what's been turned out lately. For all we know, the toy companies probably aren't interested in merit so much as in using the comics to boost sales on toy merchandise, and that wasn't exactly the case in the past decade.

There was a time when these companies crossing over could've been something to look forward to. But when one considers how woke DC/Marvel became, that's why it's best not to develop a project for them at the moment, because they could possibly ruin it. And IDW definitely hasn't proven worthy of overseeing these projects, that's for sure.

Labels: animation, crossoverloading, dc comics, history, indie publishers, licensed products, marvel comics, msm propaganda