8 Ways DC And Marvel Make It Impossible For Fans To Read Their Comics
7. Events, Events, And More Events
If it was possible to distill some of the worst things about the medium today into one word, that word would be an 'event'. And if it was possible to distill some of the worst things about 'events' into one phrase, that phrase would be called 'Secret Empire'. Because turning one of the greatest anti-fascist symbols of all time into a Nazi was a genius idea, am I right?
Events just seem to typify everything that's wrong with the superhero genre at the mo', with most tending to offer either tired cliches or retreads of stories gone-by or, in Secret Empire's case, storylines crafted with the sole intent to shock. Worse still, they just keep coming. Month after month. Year after year.
I get it, I really do; events offer spectacle and they often bring massive changes with them as well - changes that can, on occasion, lead to some fantastic individual story-arcs that shake-up tired formulas and reinvigorate certain segments of a publisher's universe. Indeed, Original Sin led to Jane Foster taking Mjolnir from the Odinson, and Final Crisis led to what was, quite possibly, the freshest take on Batman we'd seen since the seventies. The problem is that these innovative alterations to the established canon are few and far between and, in most cases, audiences are more likely to get a 'Secret Empire' than they are a '52'.