6. Excalibur Makes Fun Of Crossover Events
Marvel ComicsFor something that was a little more obvious but a little less openly hateful, you need only look to Chris Claremont and Alan David's Excalibur #14 from 1989. Excalibur were (are?) the British equivalent of the X-Men, a mash-up of characters like, er, Captain Britain and X-deserters like Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler that sorta works. Their adventures were rather charming in their own way, and became further separated from the concerns of the major X-books by going on a multidimensional adventures in the Cross-Time Caper storyline. In this particular story the team found themselves on yet another alternate Earth, this time one where the reality's supervillains had teamed up to send a calculated assault upon the world's superheroes, which saw many of the bad guys slugging it out with goodies they wouldn't usually cross paths with. In fact, when the team come across this world's Captain America, he tells them not to "restrict yourselves to your usual, traditional foes. Idea here's to mix-and-match, take on people you wouldn't ordinarily fight", if it wasn't already clear enough. The heroes and villains are caught in an never-ending, no-holds-barred battle, which means that there's a huge complex housing changing rooms and spare costumes, multiple people "playing" the part of Wolverine, and the whole things is presided over by a couple of shadowy figures who live in a building that looks suspiciously like Marvel's New York offices. Anyway, before Excalibur can figure out what's going on they have to escape the reality before Galactus destroys it for being too silly. So what's going on in this? Well, it's an obvious jab at the ridiculousness of company-wide crossover events, something which we're all sadly used to now but was a burgeoning trend back in the late eighties. DC had had their Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel their Secret Wars a few years before that, but this was the time when things kicked into high gear, with stories like Atlantis Attacks, Inferno and Acts of Vengeance, all of which get name checked here. A little good-natured ribbing from Claremont and Davis, one that's more obvious now crossovers rule everything around us.