Top 5 Comic Events since 2004
Something happened around 2004, that made comics worth reading again. For the longest time, American comics have just been issue after issue of a new villain facing off against the series hero. This made the hero basically feel alone in a universe where it should seem he/she should interact with others. So the company wide comic book megaevent was invented. There haven’t really been many of these until around 2004 when japanese manga was beating comics with their superior story telling and multidimensional characters. Something had to be done or comics would be done for. When done right the megaevent is like a satisfying summer blockbuster film, when done wrong it feels like you just wasted 6 months of your life waiting on it. So here are my top 5 comic events (sticking to just Marvel and DC to keep it easy on myself).
5. Annihilation (Marvel, 2006)
This was a gamble that paid off big time for Marvel. They had a bunch of “space” characters invented from the space craze of the the 70’s and 80’s who haven’t seen the light of days in years. Characters with the dumbest names like Blastaar and Annihilus got a completely new makeover that made them 100 times cooler than they used to be. The storyline is basically Annihilus gathers up just about everybody who would serve him in the Negative Zone and formed an army of about a trillion guys (the Annihilation Wave) and then sent them out all at once to just blitzkrieg the universe. They took out a bunch of characters that seemed invincible at the time including Thanos, a Watcher, and even incapacitating Galactus. It ends with an epic scene of Nova ripping the spine out of Annihilus, cementing him as one of the most kickass characters ever. Marvel made two followup series Annihilation Conquest and War of Kings which continue to bring interesting stories to the Marvel Space line.
4. 52 (DC, 2006)
Ok American comics defintely don’t do weeklies like manga, but DC goes hey we’ll give it a shot. Taking 5 of the best writers and a bunch of artists, plus with J.G. Jones on covers, it was going to take a lot to make it work (hey at least manga only has to be like 10 pages a week in black and white, these guys had to pump out 22 page full colored spreads for 52 weeks straight). 52 began straight after DC’s Infinite Crisis event showing the aftermath of all that went down. It was special because it didn’t highlight the big characters, but focuses on the C listers of the DC universe and introduced newer characters as well. There were all sorts of intersecting storylines in 52 including Booster Gold discovering the mystery of Rip Hunter’s bunker, Elongated Man avengeing his wife’s death, Wondergirl trying to resurrect Superboy, the path to become the new The Question, and Lex Luthor’s deadly Everyman Project just to name a few. 52’s ending was satisfying though the adjacent ending of World War III was kind of stupid and random. DC continued to do weeklies with Countdown to Infinite Crisis (good at the beginning, got worst by the end), Trinity (this just confused me), and Wednesday Comics (kick back to good ole newspaper style).
3. Infinite Crisis (DC, 2005-06)
Some could say that this was a desperate attempt to make a storyline, by pulling an old one and redoing it. But it turned out a lot better than expected. So “Crisis” events are used for only one reason and that is to jump start DC comics, the first Crisis on Infinite Earths (back in the 80’s) was used to tidy everything up since there were too many versions of the same character. Infinite Crisis did the opposite and broke and messed everything up, but in a kind way. The story is that there are a few survivors of the first crisis who are deem the current universe too corrupted and evil to keep going, so the crazied mind of Alexander Luthor tries to make the perfect world. Though the bad guy that stole the show had to be Superboy Prime (which just showed that Superman isn’t as perfect as we think he is). Grant Morrison followed Infinite Crisis up with the epic fail that was Final Crisis (which is weird since he usual is a terrific writer). This seems to be the end of the Crisises for now anyway.
2. Sinestro Corp War (DC, 2007-08)
They really should just have Geoff Johns on these epic events because he’s really good at them. The dude single handedly resurrected Green Lantern and give it one of the greatest runs in history. In the second of a 3 arc Ultimate Green Lantern epic was Sinestro Corp. Now most comic readers know that Sinestro has a yellow ring which does the same thing as the green ring. Johns went with the idea of what if Sinestro started recruting his own lantern army. He did and boy did he do some intense recruiting. The big 5 of his team was himself, Cyborg Superman (massacred an entire city), Parallax Kyle (the strongest Green Lantern corrupted), Superboy Prime (umm the event above this one), and finally the friggin Anti-Monitor (killed just about everybody in the first Crisis). The DC heroes had to ban together and pull every trick they had to even win this one. This event was different from the other DC events as it wasn’t its own title but collected in both the Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corp books. Green Lantern has risen to be one of DC’s top titles and just started up John’s epic finale of Blackest Night.
Consolations…
-Blackest Night (DC, 2009) Though it has only been 3 issues this event seems to have enough steam to be greater than even Sinestro Corp War
-Identity Crisis (DC, 2004) I wouldn’t count this as a megaevent, but it is a definite must read, this basically showed that the DC Heroes can have character flaws and not just superpower weaknesses
-Secret Invasion (Marvel, 2008) The whole who can you trust thing was cool at the beginning, though it got old really fast. Big thing about this event it brought back a bunch of cool missing characters including Nick Fury and Mockingbird
-Planet Hulk (Marvel, 2006) Hulk didn’t show up in the #1 comic book event, why? Because he was unleashing the beast on a gladiator planet. For the first time there were those who could easily best the Hulk and he would have to take his game up to another level just to survive
-World War Hulk (Marvel, 2007) Which the Hulk does and for this event just beats down everybody in the Marvel U (badly I do say) and it takes the uber Sentry to knock out this Hulk
-House of M (Marvel, 2005) This one broke barriers with the first of the modern age megaevents and the first modern storyline that combines an alternate universe with the main continuity.
-Grand Theft America (Marvel, 2006) Yeah this is basically a modern day retelling of the Avengers origin story, but good god was this an epic event. It would totally be #2 on this list if it wasn’t for being in the Ultimate Marvel line of comics. If they do make an Avenger movie, they should just take Grand Theft America as the basis and redo it scene by scene, because it reads like an action movie.
1. Civil War (Marvel, 2006-07)
I don’t care that Brian Michael Bendis wrote all the events up to and after Civil War, you get Mark Millar and Steve McNiven on something and you get epicness. DC just wrapped up their Infinite Crisis and Marvel released this and gave DC a huge F U. What made it great was it made it more then just being a fanboy’s who’s better one hero or another. It gave readers a really deep question they needed to answer who was right? The story was that something bad happened and many innocents were killed because of reckless heroes, so should anyone become a hero? Iron Man lead the U.S. effort to register all the heroes of America and keep them in order. While Captain America wants to stand for freedom and the privacy of the lives of the heroes. It’s basically a liberal vs conservative clash out with superheroes. It pushed just how far these characters would go to defend their ideals over the others. It included many amazing moments including Spider-Man’s public unmaksing, the hiring of villains to take out the enemy, the deadly clone of Thor kills Goliath, the creation of a superhero prison, and Captain America going to jail and killed afterwards. Marvel learned the power of tie-ins from this event, by releasing other titles besides the main one to add more to the main storyline. Marvel used this as a launching point and every Marvel comic still feels the ripples of what happened during Civil War.
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