Big Events

[thewritejerry]

Going back to your 8/31 column (I'm just catching up on my reading) --

Another problem with Big Events, is that they do nothing to expand the reader base and bring new people into comics. By their very nature, you need an intimate knowledge of the who's, what's and why's to read your way through a big event.

Any non-fan who even trips across a big event will end with a "huh?" because events are often designed to just give the illusion of change.

I think summer events can be fine when they are billed as just a really great story and not trumped up to be universe changing.

[Steven Grant]

When I was a kid, the big event was the annual JLA-JSA crossover. Something to look forward to every year, and it was special because that was the only time it happened. Three really memorable stories for the time: the first, where the two teams met and learned about their parallel worlds while fighting villains from both; the second, where evil counterparts of DC's main superheroes from a third Earth fought both teams; and the third, where Earth-1's bad Johnny Thunder gets hold of Earth-2 Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt and changes everything so the JLA heroes never exist, and the JSA has to come straighten everything out.

By the fourth one, in the camp era of Batman, they'd ceased to be much special.

Let's face it, big events in comics just ain't all that big...

[dancj]

Any non-fan who even trips across a big event will end with a "huh?" because events are often designed to just give the illusion of change.

I'm not so sure. When I read Crisis on Infinite Earths I was only really familiar with Superman and I thought it was fantastic. My sister had even less knowledge and loved it too.

Of course in those days stories spelled things out for you a bit more...

[thewritejerry]

I'm not so sure. When I read Crisis on Infinite Earths I was only really familiar with Superman and I thought it was fantastic. My sister had even less knowledge and loved it too.

Of course in those days stories spelled things out for you a bit more...

I think part of the "huh" that non-fans have when they read a big event (if non-fans are even that often drawn into and stay with a big event through completion) is that nothing significant truly happens in the story because most big events don't cause real changes. Most big events in the modern comics era are fixes/retcons to old continuity or don't show any true growth and change in the central characters of the story. The reader gets to the end and says "okay, so all of this stuff happened, they explained some things from the back story but not everything so I'm a bit confused, and then at the end, the main players are the same as they were at the beginning; what purpose did this serve?"

Big Events don't grow the industry, they mainly serve the core fan-base.