I suppose it’s that time again: A week of solid releases, but no book really raising a topic worth unpacking or doing anything to challenge the way the comic book medium is seen or digested.
That means its time to look at whatever cross-over event book Marvel is doing, and, again, explain why it is creating interesting ideas and scenarios that it immediately culls through drunken marketing practices and a misunderstanding of the product it is selling.
Axis is ultimately a failed execution of an interesting thesis. In what might be the most comic-booky narrative choice in history, Red Skull steals Charles Xavier’s brain and nearly manages to use it to throw the entire population of the world into a giant rage fueled riot in an attempt to cleanse the earth of mutants.
During the battle to stop him, a large group of heroes and villains have their moral compasses reversed. Good guys are bad, bad guys are good.
It is interesting, and it (arguably) puts up the highest stakes in the history of marvel crossovers. There isn’t the normal event book question of “who will die at the end?” The heroes have more than their lives at risk here; they risk their souls.
This leaves the creative team managing the event book and all of its tie-ins with the opportunity to take some interesting risks that could change the course Marvel continuity. You could have heroes committing acts of depravity that would change the way the public sees them and the way they see themselves.
What if some heroes were never returned from their inverted state. What if Captain America, fell from the cultural representation of our nations moral compass and became a thug and a sociopath? How would the people of a nation handle having their Jiminy Cricket turn into Charles Manson?
The brilliance of this catalytic idea gives us so many directions to go and idea veins to mine. This could have, and should have, been the most interesting thing Marvel has done since Civil War. We readers should be filling the unknown of the next issue with wild theories and questioning the new world that will be left in the wake of Axis.
That is not happening. It is not going to happen.
Its not going to happen because there is no void. There is no brave, unknown world being built by the fiction super computers at Marvel. There are only the marketing drones. The soloist spitting hacks that produce promotional material in an attempt to build hype and awareness for the next event. The next crossover. The next big plate of brilliance they have so deliberately assembled for us.
We know what will happen in Axis, or at least we know what will not happen. The current run of Avengers and New Avengers takes place just a few months after Axis, yet it is running at the same time as Axis.
As a white board idea it sounds cool. A Tarantino style story scramble. Give us mysteries in one book, solve them in another.
It is an ambition that not only fails, but self-destructs.
The flash-forward in Avengers reveals a world void of the consequences in Axis; a world made over, not by the inversion of its heroes, but by the unrelated events that have been going on in the previous issues of Avengers.
We see that the inversion in all the heroes has been reversed, and their actions while inverted are not even worth referring too.
But you don’t have to read Avengers to have everything spoiled for you. Marvel will reach out to you and remove all intrigue from its product at no charge to you – It’s a free service available to you via their monthly solicits.
Marvel has taken on the new practice of aggressively marketing crossover and event books that they are releasing almost half a year from now, showing us promotional material displaying which characters will be alive and in what capacity they will be involved in the story.
Time Runs Out, Secret War, a new Civil War, Years of Future Past, and the return of Planet Hulk, House of M and The Infinity Gauntlet are all events that we know are happening next year, and through marketing we know they are launching from, basically, a Marvel status quo.
So whats the point? Each event is just a prelude to the next. High stakes beget high stakes. The world is ending again, but don’t worry; I know the good guys win because I know they are saving the world again in Summer 2015.
The “event book” has begun to shine the light on the flaw of the continuing comic book universe. The intrigue will always have a ceiling because they need to sell the next issue next week, and the week after that, and the week after that until the heat death of all things.
For generations we have tolerated this because of our love for the characters and their worlds. But marketing has mistaken that love for servitude. They have spooned us their flaws and asked to believe that it tasted divine.
They are selling stories: A series of events that are meant to be appetizing for their narrative momentum and intrigue. Instead, we are condescended to. We are expected to pay four dollars an issue to see what we know will happen, happen.
I am tired of the set up. I want the pay off. Civil War did it almost 10 years ago. It didn’t spoil itself sacrificing the set-up of the next big thing. It told a complete narrative with a satisfying conclusion that warped the status quo and left characters in new, challenging places. It changed alliances and points of view.
It also set up future event books like Dark Reign and Secret Invasion, but it did it without the marketing bull horn. It did it without distracting its readers from what they were reading. It didn’t feel like a forced prolog.
It built continuity within a narrative, not force a narrative into its continuity. It let the quality of its story and the novelty of its ideas be its own marketing. It was good, and we didn’t need to be told it was good.
Marvel is confusing not having an end with not having closure. It can’t start something new because it is still chaining its fresh ideas to its old ones. In the end all they are building is shackles.
