So, how ’bout we discuss some comics?
I like crossovers. I think a lot of people do. It’s cool to see Character X meet Character Y, otherwise unrelated characters meet up in a new environment.
One of my favourite examples is “Law and Disorder”, an episode from the third season of Homicide: Life on the Street. Detectives Baliss and Pembleton go to the Baltimore train station to pick up a suspect being extradited from New York, and who should be accompanying the suspect but Chris “Detective Logan” Noth, at the time one of the stars of Law and Order. The suspect is handed over, Logan and Pembleton argue over which city is cooler, then Noth wanders off. This all happens in the opening sequence, and is never mentioned again.
It’s great. There’s no reason why Homicide and Law and Order can’t co-exist. But then they started doing official crossovers between the two shows, and now my Homicide DVD set is missing part 1 of a two-part story. (Mind you, Homicide still has the best parts of the crossover: The character interaction. Bayliss flirts badly with Jill Hennessy, and Jerry Orbach and Richard Belzer find they share a similar love interest. It’s good stuff, plot aside.)
So I enjoy overlap. And I can even get into legitimate crossovers, as long as they don’t happen too often. I love Superman/Madman Hullabaloo, because it’s just awesome fun. I love Wolverine’s totally gratuitous cameo in X-Force #120. (I’ve got Mike Allred on the brain today. Deal with it.) I love the array of guest stars who showed up for John Constantine’s birthday, and that Lucifer existed on the periphery of Sandman but never made a big deal of it. (The Death cameo was kind of gratuitous, I admit, but it did get me to take notice of the book. And at least Mike Carey balanced it out by writing a fantastic Lucifer-Destiny scene later in the series.) I even enjoyed Guy Gardener’s appearance in the most recent issue of Blue Beetle, and I normally can’t stand Guy.
But I can’t manage any enthusiasm for the near-constant state of crossover Marvel and DC seem to be producing. Sometimes, I just want to read one or two books without being sucked into yet another universe-defining crossover epic.
DC seems to have taken this approach to near-fetish levels with their insistence on labelling every single alternate Earth. There’s, like, 52 of them or something. I don’t know what they all are, but dear god, why? Why must everything fit together so precisely? Chris Claremont goes into his “multiverse” stuff now and then, but thankfully almost everyone seems to ignore him. Alternate realities are cool. Anal-retentive cataloguing of alternate realities isn’t. Apparently the Wildstorm books now take place on their own Earth, which is probbly more of a sales tactic than a storytelling strategy; perhaps those books will matter more, now?
I get the “universe” and “history” appeal of superhero books, and these things can be effective tools when used properly. But everything seems to move from event to event, and everything has to fit precisely. Many of the fans who are left can’t seem to comprehend stories that aren’t part of the tapestry, so you end up with discussions on how much of Animal Man took place in DCU continuity, or whether – god help me – Vertigo’s current crop of creator owned books are on some “Earth” all their own.
It’s just too much. Sometimes it’s cool to have stories overlap and cross over. But for the most part, it’s most successful when it’s relatively rare, when it’s actually cool or somehow surprising to see Characters A and B team up. Consistency is important, but not more important than things like “telling a good story”, “self sufficiency”, and “organic growth”.