Welcome to the first ever Daytona's Rant, I decided on that since most of the time when I go on about things Logan comments on how I've "ranted on about it". So anyway I thought I'd get things rolling this week with a little discussion on crossovers in comics.
Let me say right up front I am not a big fan of crossovers. When I was young it meant that I was either coming into a story I didn't know started somewhere else or that I wasn't going to get all the parts of a story that spanned not only multiple issues but multiple comics. These days it means that I'm simply going to be forced into picking up comics that I was not planning to or risk being lost in a story that took itself somewhere else to be told.
However the crossover is by far the greatest marketing tool for comics. Simply a way to get more comics sold in a shorter amount of time and sometimes for a large crossover a lot of comics over a greater amount of time. Crossover selling of comics is an example of sales and marketing at its finest. Yet if you’re not someone who spends a lot of money each week on comics or has a lot of room to store those comics you may see it as spending a lot of money for comics you have nowhere to store!
Some of Marvel and DC's greatest crossover stories simply couldn't have been told without using a crossover system, yet if you don't read a lot of the comics involved in the crossover you could be reading along in your favorite comic one month only to return the next month with your hero in a strange situation or a completely new situation from where you left off. I found this a little troubling for myself during Marvel's Civil War in which I was only reading The New Avengers.
However a little crossover here and there isn't all that bad, as I recently found out. I'm a big fan of Batman, but for the most part I really only read Batman not many of the other Batman comics. Yet recently "The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul" stretched back and forth between Batman, Robin, Nightwing and Detective Comics, two of each issue roughly including a Batman Annual. Begrudgingly I collected the balance of the issues and read the story as it was meant to be told. It was a good story, a really good story. So much that it simply did what it was intended to do, it got me to read other comics.
Perhaps it was the story and the crossover or perhaps it was the good timing. I've been reading Ultimate Fantastic Four and Astonishing X-Men but I've been pushing through them, not really enjoying them. So maybe it was time for a change, and going back to my Batman roots wasn’t really that much of a force. In any case yesterday I headed to the comic shop and picked up two issues or Nightwing, and an issue of Robin and Detective (I'll have to go back for the issues of Robin and Detective that I missed those issues were sold out).
Has this anti crossover collector been converted, well I doubt that, but for the time being DC gets to revel in the fact that a crossover in a successful comic line has succeeded.
I welcome your thoughts on "the crossover", like 'em or not, they do seem to work and they won't be going away any time soon! Until next week!
