Checking It Twice

Checking It Twice

Oct 29

So, here’s the thing about event fatigue.

It’s not that there are annual events.  It’s not that they take most of a year to get finished.  It’s that – at least for me – they don’t do anything.  Nothing has huge consequences anymore.  I don’t know if they ever did, but there was a point where it felt like they did.  The last two events that I really got behind were Infinite Crisis and Civil War. As literature, they aren’t the best, but shit happpens in them – an embarrassment of shit happening, in fact.  For everything that I loved about Final Crisis, all of its toys went right back into the box when they were done with the sole exception of Batman, who DC flat-out told us would be back.   Messiah CompleX, which I actually did like a lot, killed off Caliban and Deathstrike, both of whom have had significant appearances this year, and then shunted its MacGuffin into the future where it could be patly ignored most of the time.

Which is the main reason why I can get behind Marvel’s Dark Reign: The List one-shots.  I’ve read all of them except for the Hulk one – which I just haven’t been able to track down yet – and most of them have been important in establishing new status quos for the characters – whether it’s Bullseye finally erasing the last of Matt Murdock’s reluctance about leading The Hand, Namor facing down his wife Marrina, Ronin’s one-man assault on Avengers Tower, or the fight between Daken and the Punisher.  They’ve all felt like they’ve meant something big for those characters. That it has consequences for the universe.

And man, that Punisher one-shot.  I spent most of the issue saying “They didn’t just do that,” to myself.  And, of course, they did just do that.  Over and over. And I loved every second of it.

And yet I haven’t heard a lot of chatter online about these books.  Mainly because I’m avoiding a lot of comic communities for my sanity’s sake these days, maybe.  Have you been reading them, and if so, what do you think?