The trend for Marvel and DC the last few years seems to be that books which are BIG and IMPORTANT sell well (or are perceived or marketed as such), and if you want to goose a lower-selling title's sales, you just tie it into the BIG, IMPORTANT stuff for a few months. Sure, the extra sales vanish as soon as the tie-in does, but the sales increase for a few months anyway.
What I'm wondering is, how did this start? Was it at some point that the fans stopped buying titles they perceived weren't having an effect on the larger universe? Then as the fans chose to concentrate on the books whose events all the other titles had to accomodate, Marvel and DC took that cue and started promoting and selling in a way to work with that, thus the seemingly endless (especially at Marvel) cycle of Big Events which really matter, and hey the lower-selling titles are tying in to the Big Event, so those titles must actually matter, and so the fans buy them?
Or was it that Marvel and DC promoted the idea that fans should want their comic to matter, to have some kind of weight in their respective universes, by pushing the titles that did, and giving short shrift to books that didn't, and the fans accepted that, and purchased accordingly?
I have no idea which it myself. Probably a combination of the two, and likely a bunch of other factors besides. It's just a thought that came to me, and since I'm taking the weekend off, it seemed like a decent discussion post to set up before I shut down.
Any thoughts, recollections, theories?
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Well the BIG EVENT books, at least for Marvel, always used to be the Annuals (so you had Atlantis Attacks, Evolutionary War, etc). So there was probably always a bit of a trend where EVENTS goosed sales of lower selling (the annuals) books.
But the current trend of BIG EVENT-itis in Marvel can probably be blamed on the X-men, more than most of the rest of the line. By the early 90's there were so many titles in the line that a person just wouldn't buy every one. So they started doing the annual crossovers that would hijack eveyone's plots for 3-4 months (Extinction Agenda, X-cutioner's Song, Age of Apocalypse).
The Avengers and the FF would do it occasionally as well (crossing over with each other). But it wasn't the same.
It peaked with Onslaught in the 90's, when they pretty much blew up the universe with it for a while.
So for short term causes I would say, blame the X-men (damn dirty mutants). Long term though it's probably DC's fault for the Crisis of Infinite Earths.
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