That's Some Mighty Fine Hair-Splitting

When Marvel's publisher Dan Buckley says, 'I want to clarify we do not do "crossover" events,' what are the odds he said that with a straight face? 5%? 10%? Maybe I'm not giving him enough credit for believing his own spin. Let's say 64%.

I do see this distinction he's trying to make. He argues Marvel does 'line-wide editorial events', as opposed to crossovers. Oh, that's much better. Yes, it's not a crossover because it's one main title with all these other smaller titles branching off of it, rather than two books bouncing the story between them.

Seriously though, the idea being you can read the parts you want and still get a complete story. It's a nice idea, but in practice, it's a load of crap. If you really want to follow Fear Itself, the main mini-series, there's probably going to be relevant stuff taking place in other mini-series. The ongoings may not be essential to the process, but you'd be hard pressed to now that from the marketing machine, with their massive checklists telling you what related books are coming out each week of each month for the duration of the crossover, oops editorial event. It's pointless to complain about the hype machine, I suppose.

And what was that Amazing Spider-Man/Daredevil thing I reviewed earlier this week? I don't think you could read the first half and get the whole story. It ends with Spider-Man being electrocuted while the Black Cat looks on. You'd have to read the other half to find out what happened to Spidey, if they found the holo-device, and if they cleared Felicia's name. Unless the recap pages are really thorough.

That said, the writers on the ongoing series are usually pretty good at incorporating events into their stories. Peter David and Fabian Nicieza handled Civil War well (on X-Factor and Cable/Deadpool). David used it to look at Madrox' indecisiveness and Layla's manipulations. Nicieza had it widen the divide between Wade and Cable, explored some of Wade's issues, and even presented a fairly reasonable point of view for the pro-reg side. I wasn't a big fan of the Secret Invasion tie-ins for Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy, but they were set up in a way that made a certain amount of sense. Actually, I did like the Nova tie-in, I just didn't like that it lead to the book being set on Earth for about five more issues after that.