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With this space I have been given (thanks, Today.com!) it is my intention to drone on about all things comics. I might discuss comic books, or maybe a comic book based movie, or even a comic book inspired toy or action figure. It is a pretty wide open field really, and when the urge strikes me I will be coming here to share my thoughts.

Something I have been thinking upon recently is how the nature of the event has changed somewhat drastically in regards to mainstream comic book publishers. Let me elaborate. Until a couple of years ago, we were used to seeing the Big Two (that’s Marvel and DC comics , for the uninitiated) roll out their yearly company-wide crossovers and events; sometimes it would be during the Summer and sometimes it would be during the Fall, but they would happen over the course of afew months and then it was back to business as usual. Most of the time there were no real implications for the regular titles after such events - nothing really changed for the characters all that much.

Recently however, this has not been the case. In the past couple of years we have seen the growth in popularity of the stretched out event, a company wide storyline that starts slowly and builds up steam for over half ayear (or longer) and then sets the stage for the launch of the main event, something that usually now gets its own limited series lasting at least five or six issues. Once the storyline has been wrapped up, there are now usually some noticeable changes in the companies regular monthly titles, things like characters being moved to another title, or irrevocably changed in some way, or even killed off (although regular comic readers know that by now no one really stays dead in the comics anymore).

Notice that I never claimed that this had never happened before in the past: it has, only it never seemed to catch on in any way resembling aregular practise. One notable company wide event that took over a year to unfold was one done by DC comics in the mid eighties; it was done as a twelve issue maxi-series and called Crisis on Infinite Earths. This series is almost canon to most modern DC comic readers. It was DC’s attempt to pull in the reigns on its universe of characters that were at that time spread out on multiple dimensions; characters from the forties and fifties were grouped together on one Earth (known as Earth 2), while characters from the sixties onwards were mostly located on Earth 1. Throw in the fact that there were multiple versions of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and you can see why DC was trying to get things abit more ’streamlined’.

Anyway, this lasted twelve months and the fall out from the storyline was huge for the company - many books were relaunched and many top name creators came over to DC comics to try their hand at the various characters. Ironically, DC has just recently decided to revert to a multiple universe/dimension format again, and again it was in the form of a company wide stretched out event - of course.

In my next post, I will take look at the concept of the “never ending event” and discuss how it has negatively effected many regular comic book readers.

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