Wednesday is Comic Day!

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I was very disappointed by the ending of Secret Invasion. My biggest frustration with it is that the story didn't serve the ending (or vice versa). I was thinking about this and coming to the conclusion that this seems to be a repeating theme at Marvel. A quote from today's Cup of Joe column with Marvel Editor in Chief, Joe Quesada, reinforced that view, for me. Joe said: "But what really excited me about Secret Invasion is where it ended, where it left us. It's evident that we're now in a Norman Osborn world." It is this way of looking at things that upset so many fans with the One More Day Spider-man story. Although the opinions on whether or not Spider-man should remain married to Mary Jane were split - it was hard to find many people that thought the way the story ended served the story. Quotes from interviews with J.M. Straczynski implied that the editorial view was that where they ended was more important than how they got there. It was okay to have Peter make a deal with the devil if it resulted in an exciting 3 times a month Spider-man book. There seems to be a mindset, at Marvel, that the ends justify the means. The quality of a story doesn't matter if the end of the story sets up a new exciting place to tell stories. From a short term economics viewpoint, maybe this is good. Looking at the sales figures for any of the big event books, one will see that the sales for the last issue is usually about 40% lower than the sales for the first issue. So it doesn't really seem to matter if a story is ended well, as long as it sets up a new story that can have high initial sales. Long term, however, there has to be a point when the fans will say "I've had enough!" and stop buying. People have been predicting this saturation point for a long time, but it hasn't come yet. Shouldn't Joe Quesada have been excited about the story Secret Invasion was telling and not just the new status quo with which it ended? Shouldn't he have been excited about the story One More Day was telling and not just the new status quo it presented? How about House of M? or Civil War? or World War Hulk? Secret Invasion could have been the ultimate Skrull story - but instead it was a non-story. There was so much potential there. All those teaser photo advertisements for "Embrace Change" and the Embrace Change website led fans to think this time the story was real - we were getting a great big exciting story that served itself. In fairness to Joe Quesada and Marvel - they aren't the only ones that seem to view things this way. DC and Dan Didio don't seem to be much different. There really wasn't a story to Infinite Crisis - it seemed to purely exist to create a particular status quo. I've yet to detect a story in Final Crisis - but the post event solicits seem very similar to the post Infinite Crisis solicits - as if they're trying again to accomplish some goal that they didn't reach, then. For the first few months after Infinite Crisis, the big three were M.I.A. Guess what, for the first few months after Final Crisis, Batman and Superman are again M.I.A. It is possible to tell a good story while at the same time having an end goal to create a new dynamic. There have been a few excellent examples in the last couple of years. World War Hulk is one from Marvel and The Sinestro Corps is one from DC. Standing by itself, Planet Hulk is a damn fine story. You could give the book to people that don't read comics and they would be satisfied that they got a good story. They wouldn't need to get the next year of books to figure it out. Yet, it ended in a dynamic that did make the reader interested to see where it was going to go. Give Secret Invasion to someone that doesn't read comics and they would probably respond "It started great, the writer set up so many ideas and there was great action - but when I got to the end it didn't explain anything that happened and nothing that happened seemed essential to get to the end. Were the Skrulls really necessary to set up Norman Osborn to be where he is? Couldn't the Norman Osborn setup have been accomplished in two or three issues?" I don't want Joe and Dan to be excited about where stories end - I want them to be excited about the journey we will go on to get to that end.