Unlike John Byrne, I love Wikipedia. Not as an information resource of value, really - mosty because it’s a handy way to catch up on comics series that I may never have finished. After finding out from Teletraan-1 that Circuit Breaker from the Marvel Comics Transformers series was used as a character in Secret Wars II so the company could claim ownership, I followed a link over to the wiki entry about that series. This in particular made me smirk:
Secret Wars II went far beyond any previous crossover by having minor and major tie-ins with nearly every other title in the Marvel Universe. Some tie-ins consisted of little more than a cameo by the Beyonder. A collector trying to own the “whole” story would need to have purchased nearly 42 comics in less than a year. Though the story could be understood by reading the main mini-series alone, the number of tie-ins was controversial at the time. Also some readers criticized the series for its meandering storyline and its perceived philosophical clumsiness. The series was a big sales success however, and most comics which linked with it saw a modest rise in sales. It paved the way for subsequent large crossovers such as Inferno, and Fall of the Mutants.
Wow, a whopping 42 issues in your massive Marvel crossover. Is it just me, or does that seem really quaint in the wake of the 100+ mark Civil War is hitting? The only crossover I’ve ever really cared about, Invasion!1 hit the 30-issue mark, but it featured a strong core that you could read on its own and pick up whatever titles tickled your fancy without feeling like you were missing anything critical. That’d be what I call a marked contrast to Civil War, where the (to be fair, written well enough to be almost justified) revelations for Reed Richards’s behavior don’t take place in the main title, but over in Fantastic Four. That’s clever on Marvel’s part. They’re basically saying “So, if you were wondering why a main character in this story flipped out and was suddenly building interdimensional prisons and rounding up his pals to put in them, go read this other comic,” and people are replying with “Here are my pennies, my good publisher!”
Good for them as a business; shame on them as a group of storytellers.
1Yeah, I like DC 1,000,000 but only for the main story - the non-Morrison stuff leaves me pretty cold, excluding the Young Heroes In Love and Hitman stories.
