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By Jason Bourgeois
Welcome back to Grey Matters for September! If you're just joining us, I am visiting lovely Atlanta, GA and attending the giant scifi/fantasy/television/film/comics/kitchen sink convention, Dragon*Con. Be sure to keep your browsers pointed right at the Collector Times next month for my con report, and photos.
But I digress, let's get back into why we're here, comic books!
This time out, as we've been looking at event storylines for the last few months, I wanted to take a look at the return of a classic recurring event from the '80s and '90s that has made its return to the comic pages recently, the yearly X-Crossover.
In a lot of ways, the X-Men's crossovers are what really set the bar for these sort of events, as they were huge sellers, showed how they could be done well - and badly, to be more than fair - as well as being something to look forward to, as years of build up for major storylines came to a head and showed the strength of a shared universe, where events in one place, effected things in other titles, in big and small ways.
It all started fairly small with the Mutant Massacre. This wasn't so much an official crossover, but it is definitely where everything has its roots. The shadowy Mister Sinister hired several mutants to act as his Marauders and wipe out the mutant abberations living in the Morlock tunnels beneath Manhattan. Naturally, the X-Men got involved, as well as X-Factor, and even Thor put in an appearance. The Morlocks were all but wiped out (Something which would happen quite frequently every few years since, actually, and none of them have ever quite stuck), and the X-Men themselves suffered loses. Shadowcat and Nightcrawler were critically injured and shipped off to recoup at the Muir Island research facility, where they would eventually be in place to form Excalibur. Angel was pinned to a wall by his wings, and they eventually had to be amputated, and he committed suicide, and others. This was an event that mattered, and changed the fundamental landscape of the mutant universe.
The following year, things got even bigger, with the Fall of the Mutants. This was less of a crossover, and more of a coordinated event where bad things happened to all of the mutant teams, of which there were only three. Weren't those the days? However, each book was given trade dress with the Fall of the Mutants logo, which was also placed, in a much smaller way, on lesser tie in books. This time around, things got even worse. The X-Men themselves sacrificed their lives to stop an incursion by a mystical entity, to be brought back and believed dead, while living in Australia. They stayed there for a good number of years, and their continued existence wasn't revealed to the world at large for quite some time. X-Factor encountered Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen, one of which was a transformed Angel, attacking them as the Horseman, Death. They strived to stop the five villains from destroying New York, in a struggle of survival of the fittest. The New Mutants found a new ally in Bird Brain, a strange hybrid creature that lead them back to a Dr. Moreau like madman, and his own island of misfit creations, where one of their own bravely sacrificed his life to save Wolfsbane from the scientist's gun.
It was a dark time for the X-Men corner of the MU, but things went straight to hell the year after. Literally.
Inferno hit, and Hell was unleashed upon the Earth. Demons invaded, and this was a true crossover. New York City was infested with demons, and everyone was involved in the same event, if not the same exact storyline. The X-Men finally revealed to their friends, and the original X-Men, that they were alive, if being turned by the demonic influences circulating around. The New Mutant's Magik, at the center of the invasion due to her demonic dark half, sacrificed herself and was reverted to a child, an innocent from before she was tainted. X-Factor searched for Cyclops' missing son, and found him with his ex-wife, Madelyne Pryor. Maddie had been turned by the demons into their Goblin Queen, and was going to sacrifice her child as the final step in forever opening the portal between Earth and Limbo, and it was also revealed that she was a clone of Jean Grey, created when Jean was thought dead the first time, to breed an important child for Mister Sinister.
The invasion of New York spread far past the X-Books, and almost every Marvel title that occurred in NYC had some sort of tie in with the larger event, even if it was just a fun Halloween themed story of the book's protagonist fighting some random demons. Marvel had seen the success that the previous crossovers had, and each one grew larger, taking in more of the Marvel Universe each year, and really playing with shared events across many titles.
Inferno may have been a large crossover, but to get the whole story, all a person needed was the few X-Books out at the time. The other stories were inconsequential to the larger arc, and were just fun tie ins for those characters, as demons invaded the Marvel Universe. Such an event should have ramifications across the board, especially if the writers have a good story to tell.
Things were scaled back in the next few crossovers, as things once again became X-Men centric. X-Tinction Agenda was contained to the three mutant titles, and X-Cutioners Song was kept to the four that were there in the 90s. By the time of the late '90s, Marvel went back to a universe-wide X-Crossover with the Onslaught event, which had an evil aspect of Charles Xavier going mad and becoming it's own entity, and threatening all life on the planet, and ended with the sacrifice of the Avengers and Fantastic Four, leading into the year-long event of Heroes Reborn, with new versions of those characters being handled by Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld.
Since then, things have remained mostly quiet, with each book focusing on its own stories, and just trying to do its own thing. This ended up creating a disjointed feeling across the line, as things didn't seem to match up, and writers had different ideas, different styles, and things that just didn't seem to be happening with the same characters in some books.
Almost ten years since Onslaught, Marvel is back at it with another crossover, Endangered Species, which is just a setup for the real crossover coming later this year, Messiah Complex. Can't have an X-crossover without an X in the title.
With the current state of things, there being only 300 or so mutants left in the entire world, things are dire for the X-Men. They'll be a dead race soon, so the Beast has gone on a quest for answers, if not a solution.
The build up of Endangered Species is a 12 part series of eight page backup stories in four different X-Men titles. This seems like a waste to some people, but since the issues aren't any more expensive, it's essentially a little extra story for no extra cost, to the regular readers, and only being across four titles, it has a good chance of drawing new readers over to titles they may not already buy, to follow the rest of the story they've read in, say, Uncanny X-Men. 12 parts may be a bit long, and asking for too much for too little to some people, but overall it's not a bad strategy for Marvel.
And this all leads into the proper crossover at the end, kicking off with a one shot special, and then crossing through the same four titles as Endangered Species, but no longer being relegated to backups, and instead being full stories in full issues, for another 12 parts. For a crossover, this isn't so bad. It's only a few months long, and most people into the X-Books would likely already be buying one or two of those books. It is also a good time for the X-titles to show that they are a cohesive universe, and get all he writers back on the same page, and tell yet another Earth shaking event in the lives of Marvel's merry mutants. The only downside is the timing, with all the other crossovers, especially World War Hulk, things seem too crowded and asking for too much all at the same time. If Endangered and Messiah were at a different time of the year, things might seem more welcoming to other readers. Fortunately, the heart of Messiah Complex takes place once things have quieted down some, and hopefully will appeal to more people as the only event on the shelves. The X-Books could use the shot in the arm, and this is shaping up to be just the thing to satisfy the sales, and the readers.
Jason M. Bourgeois
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