The other day I praised Marvel for how together it is in terms of getting all its books on the same page for its meta-story-driving events. But as you might glean from posts like Marc-Oliver Frisch’s regarding the preview solicits for Dark Reign, the next big overarching plotline–or even, perhaps, from Marvel’s October sales chart–there are a couple of massive potential pitfalls to this storytelling model. First of all, as I alluded to earlier, the big story could be (and, for the most part, has been) stupid. Secondly, I think that as exciting as having one giant unified meta-story can be for fans, the problem lies where the rubber hits the road–when you need to take a million different characters and storylines and filter them through that giant unified meta-story.* Not every superhero concept, writer, or artist is a good fit with Skrulls doing the Cylon thing. And even when there’s not a direct Secret Invasion crossover going on, virtually everything Marvel publishes now reflects the Brian Michael Bendis brand of superheroics, i.e. superheroes as seen through the lens of crime, black ops, and/or the military-industrial complex. That’s gonna work fine with some characters and creators but less so with others. Even ones that do lend themselves to that tone are being potentially cut off from exploring other fruitful avenues. For example, right now New Avengers is prepping for a storyline involving the magical supervillain Dormammu, Doctor Strange’s archnemesis. This could be a psychedelic freakout like Promethea or Seven Soldiers: Zatanna, it could be Lovecraftian, it could be an old-school Ditko magic rumble, the narrative could be fractured and fractalled and messed with in a way appropriate to magic, but instead, I imagine will read like all the other down-and-dirty superhero comics Bendis has written, only with magic. I’m not sure that’s a great idea. It’s worth noting that Bendis, a Sean T. Collins fave who has written a solid shelf’s worth of very good superhero comics I’m happy to own, has already done a “down-and-dirty” magic story, Daredevil: Decalogue. That “magic via crime” spin led to some genuinely frightening, weird, and memorable comics. But the shock of the new is gone, replaced by the sense that it’s one way or the highway, and I think Marvel’s suffering for it.
* In a way, Marvel theoretically has a leg up on DC in this regard, for the same reason that Marvel’s Universe has always felt like a more cohesive, common-sense grouping than DC’s: Virtually every important Marvel character and concept was created by the same dozen or so guys–Golden/Silver Agers like Simon, Everett, Kirby, Lee, Ditko, and Romita Sr., plus a few later folks like Wein, Claremont, Miller, Bendis and so forth. By contrast, you could come up with at least that many names integral to the creation of the Big Seven Justice Leaguers alone! But that’s not to say that every character in the Marvel Universe can comfortably fit in the same story; when you look at it that way, I wonder if Marvel isn’t now experiencing in micro (characters from a recognizably uniform universe nonetheless suffering when forced into line up and march in unison) what the DCU has long exhibited in macro (characters from a huge number of writers, artists, and even companies pooled into the same sprawling universe and looking kind of weird next to each other oftentimes).
Having the Green Goblin take over America and not calling the story Purple Reign feels like a missed opportunity to me.
I totally agree with where you went with this, but gad damn, Decalogue was the fucking tits. That one filled my pants, front section.
Yeah, a terrific comic, and it also showed that you could sidestep the A-story of your lengthy superhero-comic run for an arc and not stink.
Help me out here. Where was the Norman Osborn character rehabilitated so that this is not stupid on all levels? That comic whose name is not Thundercats even though that’s all I can think of its name being?
I think it was Thunderbolts, yeah. It’s still as dumb as a bag of hammers, however. “Now that you’re out on parole, Charles Manson, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind being in charge of the CIA.”