10 Comic Book Crazes You Totally Forgot Were A Thing

Crossovers and huge events are still around in the comics, but there was a time when they were the absolute norm. It was common in the late-20th century to feature storylines that involved characters from one team or another, but the biggest producer of this type of story in the '90s was Marvel Comics.

Before huge events like the Clone Saga hit Spider-Man's books, the comics were linear in their storytelling. When issue #255 came between #254 and #256, you could rely on the story either being a one-off or a continuation or conclusion of whatever story it was telling.

As the stories became more complex, and Marvel opted to publish multiple Spider-Man books, the linear storytelling readers had enjoyed for 30+ years was broken. You would pick up an issue of Amazing Spider-Man but would have to get Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man if you wanted to continue reading the story.

If you couldn't afford to buy the plethora of Spider-Man books at the time, you would read the next month's issue of ASM, and the story wouldn't pick up directly after the last one since it did that in the pages of another book. Marvel wasn't the only publisher guilty of doing this sort of thing, but it continued well into the 1990s, and a lot of fans couldn't keep up.