Did Fear Itself have any lasting effects?

[Songbird/Diamondback]

I think Fear Itself gets a lot more hate than it deserves. Do you really judge an event based on the amount of status quo change? I'm glad that Fear Itself didn't shake everything up the same way Civil War did.

Quickly revived/undone deaths > Permanent event deaths (Wasp says hi)

Was it great? No. But the worst? No way. Civil War and Secret Invasion had far worse characterization. Additionally, Secret Invasion had wonky pacing and art, and elements of Civil War's plot made no sense at all.

Fear Itself was underwhelming and quite basic, but at least it had excellent art, an obvious story progression and didn't "ruin" any characters (like Tony Stark in Civil War, Hawkeye in Secret Invasion). I think most of the dislike for Fear Itself is just event fatigue.

Fear Itself was just plan boring. That makes it quite horrible.

[Will.S]

It's an event where no consequences really happened.
Even the two "BIG DEATHS" were undone 3 months after the event ended.

I honestly have no problem with that, not every event has to have Civil War/Secret Invasion style long standing ramifications and the "major" deaths were never going to stick anyway given the popularity of those characters.

Honestly, I found it a waste of time. Nice art by Immonen and some decent character moments but on the whole not worth picking up in my opinion. Comfortably the weakest Marvel event of the modern era.

I'd say it's better than Secret Invasion but not by much.

[Telos]

Fear Itself was just plan boring. That makes it quite horrible.

I found Secret Invasion far worse in that regard, considering the five issues wasted in the Savage Land. The battle scenes in issue #7 were boring too - they amounted to everybody randomly jumping at everybody, with very little progression to the fights. The final battle of Secret Invasion was a great example of how not to do a large-scale battle scene.

It was like this for almost every page of #7, but with dialogue.



Fear Itself's fight sequences were at least engaging.

[Songbird/Diamondback]

I found Secret Invasion worse in that regard, considering the five issues wasted in the Savage Land. The battle scenes in issue #7 were boring too - they amounted to everybody randomly jumping at everybody, with very little progression to the fights. The final battle of Secret Invasion was a great example of how not to do a large-scale battle scene.

It was like this for almost every page of #7, but with dialogue.

I never bothered to read Secret Invasion. Also, HA, Spotted Diamondback in that picture.

[Telos]

I never bothered to read Secret Invasion. Also, HA, Spotted Diamondback in that picture.

Lucky you, it almost makes Fear Itself look great in comparison. I can see her too, bottom left!

[Will.S]

I found Secret Invasion far worse in that regard, considering the five issues wasted in the Savage Land. The battle scenes in issue #7 were boring too - they amounted to everybody randomly jumping at everybody, with very little progression to the fights. The final battle of Secret Invasion was a great example of how not to do a large-scale battle scene.

It was like this for almost every page of #7, but with dialogue.



Fear Itself's fight sequences were at least engaging.

It's not so much that Secret Invasion wasn't engaging, SI had great potential and I think those sects of religious zealot skrulls were given a nice array of depth to them in both the main mini and the tie ins but a lot of problems brought it down such as:

1) Highly uneven pacing

2) Heavy leaning on the tie ins to do some of the heavy character/plot lifting (T-Bolts, Avengers tie ins, etc.)

3) A non sequitur ending such as Skrulls --> Dark Cabal

Fear Itself had a lot of similar problems that Secret Invasion had such as leaning on tie ins to fill out the happenings of the Worthy, an unnecessarily protracted middle section, and too many tie-ins but just reading the main mini itself it still felt a little more self contained than Secret Invasion and it had an ending to the threat that at least had a somewhat better end game albeit with a silly amount aftermath specials.

[Sighphi]

Fear Itself books were basically events books telling you they were event books but not actually telling the story an event.
Odin's brother wasn't explained until the last few issues so for most of the story it was just some random guy screaming how he is evil.
These books also had the most perfect example of useless recap pages because what the recap page told you, you were EXACTLY told in the book you were reading and in certain occasions it was repeating in the book SEVERAL TIMES.
And as you can see by my sig.... i think that it was the most horrible event possible EVER.

I mean.... there was one book where Cap went skydiving for NO reason and in the next book he is just back in their Quinjet like nothing happened. Cap randomly when skydiving in the middle of this event!

[Algus]

I loved Fear Itself but really there was like no point in it being a big company-wide crossover. There's a bunch of the spinoffs I haven't read (and probably never will) because what happened in those books isn't even relevant to the story itself.

I've enjoyed the stuff that has come out of it though: Defenders, The Fearless, and Winter Soldier have all been good.

[Mundungus]

Assuming the deaths were reversed implied they were intended to be actual deaths during the series proper. Neither Bucky nor Thor were intended to stay dead. In Bucky's case, his death was a ruse to rid him of the scandal nipping at his heels. Thor did die, but it was part of a larger story.

I am not saying this signifies high quality, just that there are some factors that need to be taken into account.

Stuart Immonen's art was the biggest draw of the book. I don't think he was the right fit for the book, but it was still damn good to look at.

I agree you shouldn't judge an event based on how many status quo changes it has. There are only so many cards in a deck.

Fear Itself was definitely one of the weaker Marvel events, though.

[Lascoden]

I actually hate that events shake things up constantly. But, I think that criticisms that FI didn't are valid for one big reason: They said and acted like it would. It pretended to be something it wasn't. If they went out and said that "Hey, this is just a big fight" it wouldn't have been as bad. Instead, they pulled out their usual "Nothing will ever be the same again!" and, once again, failed to live up to that. And big things happened. Look at what happened to Paris. But there was no lasting impact, when there was the perfect opportunity to explore it.

Oh, should note: These weren't my problems with the event. I hated it for completely different reasons.

[Rosebunse]

It actually does hold some significance for Journey into Mystery/Loki fans and maybe Thor fans, but it's true effect won't be known for a few years.

Really, the main books were worse than bad, they were boring. JIM was pretty good and actually made the whole thing worth while.