Or – “And We Still Have Almost NO Idea What’s Going On…”
The art of the big crossover event has changed over the years. The first one, (in my memory, anyway) Secret Wars, was done almost entirely outside of the regular titles’ continuity, with the individual heroes stories jumping forward a few weeks in time, while the miniseries played out separately for the rest of the year. Crisis on Infinite Earths took place everywhere at once, causing for weird moments where characters we expected to see in one place turned up in another. Civil War annoyed me with it’s tendency to put the home titles in low gear or idle while we waited to see what played out in the main title. Secret Invasion has done a little bit of all of these, in that the Avengers titles have been indefinitely suspended in favor of Skrully Flashback Theatre, whereas Spider-Man’s home books completely ignore that anything called Skrullapalooza even happened, except for that “Mary Jane vs. Sinister Six Super Skrull” miniseries, and both Fantastic Four and X-Men have done their crossover bits as separate from their regular minis. Last issue, our heroes rallied, banding together for the big fight… What happens this issue?