10 Comic Book Arcs That Went On Too Damn Long
6. Maximum Carnage
Maximum Carnage really could have been renamed Maximum Profit, as the fourteen-part story was told in the most lucrative way possible for Marvel.
As has become all-too-common in recent years, this 1993 story was told throughout multiple different titles, meaning readers had to buy issues of no less than five different series in order to understand the full story. If you wanted to have any chance of following along this overblown arc, you had to be prepared to dish out your pocket money on not just the Spider-Man comic, but Web Of Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man, and Spider-Man Unlimited.
This seems like an outrageous number of ongoing series for one superhero, until you realise that Spider-Man currently has even more ongoing titles, including The Amazing Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Superior Spider-Man, The Astonishing Spider-Man, Spider-Man/Deadpool, and Marvel Action Spider-Man, as well as spin-offs such as Miles Morales: Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen: Ghost-Spider, The Amazing Mary Jane, and Gwen Stacy, to name a handful. Between these and the Clone Saga, it's fair to say that Spider-Fans are no strangers to an overabundance of content.
That's all Maximum Carnage really amounted to: an overabundance of content. It offered nothing new to anyone who had ever read a comic before, reducing Carnage to a two-dimensional bad guy. Its attempt at teaching a moral lesson felt like old hat to anyone who had ever read a Batman comic or heard Spock talk about the Prime Directive. A maximum waste of everyone's time.