Though the crossover dates back to the earliest days of comics (even the creation of the Justice Society was just an intercompany crossover), the perception of them as a modern and destructive innovation persist. While it is true that the shrinking comic book publishing industry has led to a lot of such stories, the problem with a crossover is not its intent, but its execution. The recent Secret Wars story at Marvel is a fine example of both the good and the bad: Taking over the entire line for several months, but leading to interesting stories being told both during and after the crossover resolved. It’s certain better than many recent examples (Convergence, Age Of Ultron and the interminable ‘Future’s End’ event), leading us to today’s nine-part query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) believes that the only answer is ‘Brightest Day’, a book that failed in terms of readability, notability and memorability, but wants to hear your voice, asking: What big ol’ crossover story, in any medium, is the LEAST successful crossover in your mind?
3 Comments
Although, it surely wasn’t least successful commercially, as far as I know, personally its recent Secret Wars. Way too long, way too incoherent, way too seen before with all these “alternate” settings. Maybe I went in with two high hopes, because original is my favorite Marvel crossover but this one couldn’t hold my interest past issue #2, not to even mention thousand tie-ins.
The Rosey and Buddy Show, an animated special where an animated Roseanne Barr and somebody named Buddy visit a cartoon land and characters like Droopy, Tweety, the animated Beetlejuice and several other animated characters appear. I remember watching it as a kid who loved all kinds of animation and finding it boring as all heck. I’ve seen it a few times since then and I still can’t figure out what the point of the special was. It wasn’t really promoting a show, since it came a few years after the end of the other animated Roseanne show, Little Rosey, and it wasn’t one of those old shows that previewed upcoming Saturday Morning cartoons either.
Convergence: We got a long series that really meant nothing while a similar story was told in the same universe.
In the end, we received a series we don’t care about starring a Silver Surfer knockoff.
Armageddon 2001: First it interrupted the Titans Hunt storyline thus creating confusion with two multiple futures and two completely different guys ruling the world, Second, the ending was spoiled leading to a nonsensical last minute change of Hawk being the Big Bad. Hawk, Really? He’s the strong dumb jock whose rage was kept in check by Dove and not your genius that could organize domino’s into a maze let alone the world.