Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 8: The Leftovers

I’ve largely tried to keep the chapters of this series A) grouped thematically and B) under 1,000 words each. As in life, not everything fits into such neat little boxes. With that in mind, here are some of the events the previous chapters missed.

Acts of Vengeance (1989): It’s the old supervillain switcheroo. A group of Loki-led nasties (Dr. Doom, Magneto, the Red Skull, the Kingpin, the Mandarin, and the Wizard) decides the best way to thwart their enemies is to change dance partners. And so you have Spider-Man fighting a giant mutant-hunting Tri-Sentinel, and Rusty and Skids from the New Mutants fighting perennial Spider-baddie the Vulture. The plot, of course, fails, mostly because the villains can’t stop fighting each other, to the point where Loki ends up imprisoning the Kingpin, the Wizard, and the Mandarin. Most importantly, we get a story in Uncanny X-Men about Psylocke being transformed into an Asian, bathing-suit clad ninja programmed to serve regular Iron Man enemy the Mandarin. This version of Betsy Braddock has largely stuck ever since. “Acts of Vengeance” also gave us the first appearance of the New Warriors superhero team, who would go on to inadvertently cause the Civil War. Fun fact: Among the villains who declined the supervillain team-up was Apocalypse. (Matt's aside: A personal favorite from this event is when Holocaust survivor Magneto slaps around Red Skull's Nazi ass in Captain America #367)

Operation: Galactic Storm (1992): A big Avengers-family crossover that spanned Avengers, Avengers West Coast, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wonder Man and Quasar. The Avengers butt into a war between the Shi’ar and the Kree because the conflict is somehow destabilizing Earth’s sun. The story is considered a throwback to the 1970s’ Kree-Skrull War, in which the Avengers also took part, and features a uniting of the two Avengers teams – East and West Coast – and an overall beefing-up of their ranks (Hey, everybody, Gilgamesh is back!). The crossover has a bit of a bummer ending: A Nega Bomb kills billions of Kree, the mastermind of the whole conflict turns out to be the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence and the Shi’ar annex the Kree, leaving Lilandra’s mad sister Deathbird in charge of them.

Maximum Carnage (1993): AKA the crossover that got me reading comics regularly. Carnage – the figurative lovechild of Venom and the Joker – breaks out of prison and goes on a killing spree across New York with his Harley Quinn, a new supervillain called Shriek, and a gang of Spider-villains including the demonic version of the Hobgoblin, Spidey’s Doppelganger from the Infinity War, and Carrion. To stop them, Spider-Man teams up with Venom, Captain America, Iron Fist, Deathlok, Nightwatch, Cloak & Dagger, Morbius, Firestar, and the Black Cat. The villains are finally defeated with the power of love and hope – in the form of a Stark-tech device apparently powered by the Star Sapphires and Blue Lanterns. The Spidey-title crossover went on to inspire a 1994 Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis video game that came in a sweet red cartridge (And shortly after all that, there was “The Clone Saga,” but the less said about that mess the better).

World War Hulk (2007): A few years back, a secret superhero cabal called the Illuminati (Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Charles Xavier, Dr. Strange, Black Panther, Namor, and Black Bolt) decided the Hulk was too much of a threat and blasted him off into space. While away, he overthrew the rulers of the planet Sakaar, took a wife and made a nice little life for himself. Then the ship that took him there exploded and killed his pregnant wife, and Hulk. Was. Pissed. So he makes his way back to Earth with some space friends to get revenge. After all is smashed and done, Hulk is reverted to his Bruce Banner form and arrested. The Incredible Hulk is renamed The Incredible Hercules, following that hero’s adventures with Amadeus Cho. A new series, Skaar, Son of Hulk, follows the adventures of … well, I suppose it’s obvious. And another new series, Hulk, debuts featuring a Red Hulk who is later revealed to be famed Hulk-hater Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross.

Shadowland (2010): Before Mark Waid could relaunch Daredevil into one of Marvel’s best books, the character had to be completely run into the ground. And how better to do that than turning him into a demon-possessed ninja lord in a sprawling crossover with the company’s other street-level heroes? In addition to the main series by Andy Diggle and Billy Tan, Shadowland sucked in Spider-Man, the Heroes for Hire, Daughters of the Dragon, Punisher, Wolverine, Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Black Panther, the Thunderbolts, Shang-Chi, White Tiger, the Night Nurse, and Elektra. Even the Kingpin appears to team up with the heroes in an attempt to stop Matt Murdock and the Hand from destroying New York. Among the series’ repercussions, Daredevil kills Bullseye (Don’t worry, he gets better); Daredevil kills himself (he gets better AND gets a new series); a new Power Man is introduced who looks like the one from Disney XD’s Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon; and the Black Panther, who has an entire country to deal with, takes over patrolling Hell’s Kitchen.

Spider-Verse (2014): A reality-hopping, Spidey-chomping, vampirish character named Morlun and his kin, the Inheritors, seek to wipe out every Spider-Man ever, until they all team up to stop them. We’re talking Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Spider-Woman, “Mayday” Parker aka Spider-Girl, Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham, Spidey 2099, Ock-Spidey, the Scarlet Spider, Gwen Stacy (whaaaa?), Uncle Ben (whaaaaaaaaa?), et al. Many Spiders die, but many Spiders also live, and some even get their own ongoing series, such as Silk, an Asian-American woman who was bit by the same spider that bit Parker; and new fan-favorite Spider-Gwen, a Gwen Stacy from a reality where she got bit and Peter Parker became the Lizard and died.

So there you have it. It’s not every crossover ever, but hopefully this series gave you more than enough background headed into Secret Wars, which if we’ve timed these right, should be starting nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnow. Happy reading!

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 7: All-New Crossovers NOW!

Avengers Vs. X-Men brought about a mass renumbering and creator roulette known as Marvel NOW, heralding a new era in which the original five X-Men from the ’60s were pulled to the present, the Avengers expanded to deal with the just-simmering end of the universe, Dr. Octopus went gallivanting around in Peter Parker’s body, and Daredevil and Hawkeye became two of the Best Books Ever.

The first big event of the NOW era was Age of Ultron, a 10-part series by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Bryan Hitch, Brandon Peterson, Carlos Pacheco, Butch Guice, Alex Maleev, David Marquez and Joe Quesada.

Ultron opens in media res, with the killer robot already having won and platoons of Ultron Sentinels prowling the streets looking for the remaining heroes. Time-travel hijinks ensue. A common theme of the Marvel NOW era is how Earth’s heroes keep screwing up the timestream with their shenanigans, vis a vis their actions in Ultron (Wolverine and the Invisible Woman travel back in time to kill Hank Pym before he creates Ultron, creating an alternate reality in which Earth is a casualty of the Kree-Skrull War, necessitating even more time travel), Beast pulling the ’60s X-Men to Earth, Kang being himself, etc.

Among its effects, Age of Ultron brought Angela – a character Neil Gaiman created for Image – into the Marvel Universe (and made her Odin’s secret daughter from a heretofore unseen 10^th realm), Galactus was shipped to the Ultimate Universe and the company launched Avengers A.I., a book about Hank Pym and a bunch of android characters, which lasted 12 issues.

Marvel has been scheduling two events a year for most of the NOW era, so later in 2013 we got Infinity, written by Jonathan Hickman (also the architect of the upcoming Secret Wars) and drawn by Jim Cheung, Jerome Opena and Dustin Weaver.

“Infinity” at Marvel has always implied a universe-spanning cosmic adventure, and so we get the mad titan Thanos attacking Earth while the Avengers are away in space trying to fight the Builders, a race of aliens introduced in Hickman’s first Avengers arc. Part of the storyline involves Hickman’s ongoing series of incursions – the collisions of Earths across the multiverse, which is how the upcoming Secret Wars will start.

Thanos and the Inhuman king Black Bolt wail on each other pretty hard, as BB tries to prevent Thanos from finding his Inhuman-descended son, Thane. In the process, Thanos sets off a Terrigen Bomb, creating more Inhumans, including the new Ms. Marvel. Among the event’s other effects, a new volume of Mighty Avengers launched, starring Luke Cage and a group of other street-level heroes (Monica Rambeau, Blade, Spider-Man, etc.), who were left behind on Earth during Infinity.

The next event is a murder-mystery. Original Sin, by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato, centers on the death of Uatu the Watcher and the theft of his eyes, which have dirt on everyone. Teams of investigators scour here, there and everywhere to determine who may have killed him. One of the eyes is in the possession of the Orb, an old Ghost Rider villain with a giant eyeball for a head. So that’s appropriate.

Along the way, the heroes also find the real Nick Fury, an old man with a seemingly limitless supply of Life Model Decoys of himself. Original-recipe Fury reveals that, in addition to running SHIELD for decades, he had a secret job protecting Earth from extradimensional threats, which jibes with his underground work during Secret Invasion. He’s also revealed to be the man who murdered Uatu, but ends up becoming his replacement. Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, in turn, replaces Fury as Earth’s guardian against extra-dimensional forces, so who’s gonna have an army of LMDs now?

Sin revealed secrets about a number of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Spider-Man learned someone else had been bitten by the same radioactive spider that bit him, the character Silk, who now has her own series. Tony Stark apparently had tinkered with the gamma bomb that turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk. Angela is revealed as Thor’s half-sister from the Tenth Realm. Dum Dum Dugan, the Howling Commando, learns he died in the 1960s and is, in fact, an LMD.

Oh, and at some point, Fury whispers something in Thor’s ear that makes him unworthy of wielding Mjolnir and being Thor. Hence, new lady Thor.

Finally, we come to Axis, an Avengers/X-Men crossover that wraps up a storyline – the Red Skull stealing Charles Xavier’s brain – that Rick Remender launched in his Uncanny Avengers title. Remender wrote Axis with art by Adam Kubert, Leinil Francis Yu, Terry Dodson and Jim Cheung.

The Red Skull has taken over Genosha – Magneto’s former mutant haven – and turned it into a concentration camp and base for broadcasting a global message of hate. Magneto is predictably pissed and confronts the Skull, who turns into a being called Red Onslaught.

Doctor Doom and the Scarlet Witch cast an “inversion spell,” intended to bring out the Xavier aspect of the Red Onslaught’s mind. The spell casts a wider net, however, and suddenly guys like Carnage, the Hobgoblin and Sabretooth are acting like heroes, Tony Stark is being a huge jerk (and is drinking again), Deadpool is a pacifist and the X-Men have pledged their loyalty to Apocalypse. Eventually, a reinversion spell is cast, returning most of the heroes and villains to their normal selves, with Stark among the few exceptions.

Oh, and at some point, it’s revealed that Magneto is not the biological father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Because movie rights stuff, I assume.

Among the new series spun out of Axis were Superior Iron Man, about the new, jerkier Stark; a new volume of Uncanny Avengers starring Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, and Wolverines, which features an inverted Sabretooth among other characters directly affected by the death of Wolverine.

That brings us to the present, mere days from the start of Secret Wars. But wait, there’s more! Check back later this week for a bonus installment, featuring a few of the crossovers we overlooked.

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 6: Disassembled to A vs. X, the Bendis Avengers years

In 2004, Marvel gave the Avengers to writer Brian Michael Bendis, who immediately disbanded the team, in a line-rebooting story called “Disassembled.” The Scarlet Witch went crazy; Jack of Hearts, Ant-Man (Scott Lang) and Hawkeye were killed; Tony Stark appeared to have fallen off the wagon again in front of the United Nations; and the Avengers realized they needed a little bit of a break (except Lionheart, who was all, “but I just bloody got here!”).

From the ashes of the Avengers rose the New Avengers, a Bendis-helmed team that mixed classic heavy-hitters such as Captain America and Iron Man with street-level heroes such as Spider-Man and Luke Cage. There also rose a story called Secret War (singular), a Bendis-penned mini in which the aforementioned heroes went on a classified mission for Original-Recipe Nick Fury into Latveria that resulted in Fury going underground and the appointment of a new SHIELD director, Maria Hill, who was decidedly anti-hero.

The next big event, 2005’s House of M, was the first of the post-“Disassembled” era and was mainly told in its own book, written by Bendis and drawn by Olivier Coipel. House of M dealt directly with the fallout from Disassembled, specifically the Scarlet Witch’s out-of-control powers. Wanda warps reality and creates an alternate world in which her father Magneto’s dream of mutant dominance comes to fore. Through a young girl named Layla Miller (a future star of Peter David’s second run on X-Factor), the X-Men and Avengers come to realize they are trapped in a world they never made, and confront Magneto and the royal family. Reality is restored, except for the part where Wanda whispers “No More Mutants,” and all but 198 of the world’s homo superior lose their powers.

Meanwhile, tensions between SHIELD and the tights-and-capes set kept climbing, coming to a boiling point in a massive explosion in Stamford, Connecticut, that was a direct result of the New Warriors hunting supervillains for a reality show. This led to the creation in Congress of the Superhuman Registration Act and caped crusaders of all stripes taking sides and battling each other in a superhero Civil War, written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven. On one side was Team Iron Man, which favored registration and the regulation of powers, and on the other side was Team Captain America, which favored freedom and the right to privacy. Civil War is notable for a few things, namely Spider-Man unmasking on national television, the death of Goliath (Bill Foster) at the hands of a robot clone of Thor, Tony Stark becoming director of SHIELD and, most importantly, the death of Steve Rogers. Don’t worry, he got better.

As if Civil War hadn’t done enough to prove superheroes have trust issues, the New Avengers had stumbled upon Elektra’s body morphed into that of a Skrull, a green, shape-shifting, craggy-jawed race of aliens. This led to months of “how do I know you’re not a Skrull?” stories that culminated in 2008’s Secret Invasion, an event series by Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu. A number of people are revealed to be Skrulls, including Hank Pym, Dum Dum Dugan and the Avengers’ butler Jarvis. Chief among the secret Skrulls though, is Spider-Woman, who is revealed to be the Skrull queen, and who also had been playing double agent for both SHIELD and Hydra. The queen is killed by, of all people, Norman Osborn, who at the time was running a government-sponsored Thunderbolts team. This leads to Osborn disbanding SHIELD and running its replacement agency, HAMMER. As a result, all heroes – not just the anti-registration ones – are now public enemy No. 1.

Osborn’s Dark Reign culminated in Siege, a 2010 event series by Bendis and Coipel that plays off recent events in Thor. The Odinson was reborn and in turn revived all his friends and Asgard itself, which was now floating a few feet off the ground in rural Broxton, Oklahoma. Loki convinces Osborn to make a play for Asgard, which, naturally, leads to Osborn’s downfall, as participation in Marvel events is mandatory for all heroes, from Spider-Man right down to Howard the Duck. Osborn falls, the government apologizes for treating superheroes like dirt for the past few years, Steve Rogers is appointed commander of all goodie-goodies and the Ewoks sing “Celebrate the Love.” Oh, and there’s a super-gross double-page spread of the Sentry ripping a dude in half.

In the next crossover, 2011’s Fear Itself by Matt Fraction and Stuart Immomen, Odin’s brother, the Norse god of fear, takes on Earth’s mightiest. Eight hammers carrying the power of the former generals of Cul, the fear god, fall to Earth to be wielded by Sin, Juggernaut, the Hulk, Titania, Attuma, Grey Gargoyle, The Thing and the Absorbing Man. In response, Tony Stark and Odin forge new weapons to be wielded by Spider-Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Ms. Marvel, Red She-Hulk and Dr. Strange. If there’s ever a crossover where death meant squat, it’s this one, as Bucky Barnes, the Thing and Thor were all shown to die but quickly got better. That said, it is in Fear Itself that Steve Rogers returns to being Captain America after leaving the role to Barnes, and Colossus becomes the Juggernaut.

The Bendis age of Avenger-dom ends with 2012’s Avengers vs. X-Men, which is fitting, considering after the crossover he jumped over to the X books. The main series was co-written by Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron and Jonathan Hickman and co-penciled by Coipel, John Romita Jr. and Adam Kubert. The event is incited by the Phoenix Force, which was coming to Earth, supposedly to possess the X-Men’s ward, Hope. The Avengers want the X-Men to fork her over, Cyclops says no and eventually we get Civil War 2: Mutant Boogaloo. When the Phoenix Force finally does come to Earth, instead of going after Hope, it splits and possesses Cyclops and his four capos: Emma Frost, Colossus, Magik and Namor. Fighting continues, Namor levels Wakanda, Cyclops kills Professor Xavier, Hope gets a training montage in Iron Fist’s home of K’un-Lun, Cyclops goes Dark Phoenix and, finally, Hope and Scarlet Witch’s powers combine to repel the Phoenix Force and, BONUS, reverse the effects of M-Day, giving all the mutants their powers back. As additional fallout, Matt writes a piece about how Cyclops was right.

Next week, we wrap this series with a look at the crossovers of the Marvel NOW era and a bonus look at some of the stories we previously missed.

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 5: Onslaught to Second Coming: Even More X-overs

So you guys remember when Charles Xavier turned Magneto into a vegetable in X-Men #25 during “Fatal Attractions?” Well, apparently a small part of Magneto had burrowed into Xavier’s head as a result and was corrupting him from the inside, causing him to do things like rocket-punch the Juggernaut into Hoboken and create Post. These events led to the big companywide crossover of summer 1996, Onslaught, named for the hot mess that was supposed to be the combined personalities of Xavier and Magneto. Onslaught encompassed all the X-books, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk, and featured cameos by Dr. Doom, Apocalypse and the Watcher. In defeating Onslaught, the Avengers, FF and Doom end up getting sucked into a pocket dimension created by Franklin Richards that led to a yearlong series of books under the banner Heroes Reborn, featuring the return to Marvel of Image ex-pats Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. In their absence, Xavier was arrested for being Onslaught, a new character named Bastion fed the flames of anti-mutant hysteria, fellow mutant-hater (and mutant supervillain progeny) Graydon Creed ran for president and a new team of superheroes showed up called the Thunderbolts. The events of Onslaught would later inspire Rick Remender’s work on Uncanny Avengers and a recent, equally messy crossover called Axis.

Bastion is the focus of the next year’s crossover, Operation: Zero Tolerance. The Master Mold-Nimrod hybrid uses an army of human-sentinel hybrids called Prime Sentinels to capture key members of the X-Men under the aegis of the U.S. government. He is apprehended by SHIELD in a scene in which he gets a stern talking-to by, of all people, Iceman, who is in revenge mode after his father was beaten to death by Graydon Creed’s lackeys before Creed was assassinated. OZT marks the addition of two new X-Men: the Morlock-Gene Nation member Marrow, whose body produces weapons made of bone, and Dr. Cecilia Reyes, a reluctant member who has force-field powers.

Next came the “Hunt for Xavier,” a tight crossover of the two main X-books in which the X-Men fight a Cerebro that has gained sentience – apparently all the X-Men’s tech has to Pinocchio at some point (see also the Danger Room) – and the professor is found to be working with the Brotherhood of (Evil?) Mutants.

The next two X-overs center on heavy-hitter villains. “Magneto War” restores the master of magnetism from bearded vegetable to top-dog baddie and gets rid of Joseph, the young Magneto clone who had ingratiated himself among the X-Men for the past few years. The story ends with the United Nations ceding to Magneto the island of Genosha, which hadn't been messed with in a while, so it was ripe for the picking.

The dawn of the new millennium brought the long-promised reveal of “The Twelve,” a group of mutants who were predicted to … do something. It turns out that something is power a machine that would help Apocalypse take over the body of Nate Grey, the refugee from the Age of Apocalypse. Sadly, nearly 15 years of build-up (The Twelve were first mentioned in an early issue of X-Factor) didn’t quite deliver the story some were hoping for. Nevertheless, the Twelve were revealed to be Magneto, Polaris, Storm, Sunfire, Iceman, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Cable, Bishop, Professor X, Mikhail Rasputin (?) and the Living Monolith (???). Apocalypse fails to possess Nate Grey but ends up possessing Cyclops instead. After a series of reality-warping stories called Ages of Apocalypse, Chris Claremont returns to the X-books and jumps them forward six months for some ill-explained power swaps, couple swaps and guys-named-Thunderbird swaps.

Then for a while, nothing happened … well, not really, but the early 00s saw a series of writers rotate through the X-books. Chris Claremont came and went, followed by Scott Lobdell, then Grant Morrison and Joe Casey, then Chuck Austen, then Joss Whedon and Claremont yet again, et al. Brian Michael Bendis wrote an X-Men/Avengers crossover called House of M, which we’ll touch on in the next post.

At this point, all but 198 of Earth’s mutants have been depowered, and the X-Men are super bummed about it. Then, for the first time in a long time, Cerebra (the sequel to Cerebro, which met its demise in the “Hunt for Xavier”), picks up a blip in Alaska, a state crawling with Summers family blood.

Which brings us to 2007-08’s “Messiah Complex,” the first of three crossovers that will center on Hope, the first baby born after M-Day. Complex finds the X-Men in a race against Mr. Sinister’s Marauders and the Rev. William Stryker’s Purifiers to find Hope. Among its significant events, Xavier is rendered comatose, Mystique kills Sinister, Cyclops sanctions Wolverine to form a new X-Force that will serve as the X-Men’s secret kill squad, Bishop loses his crap and suddenly remembers Hope is the Antichrist of his timeline, and Cable takes Hope into the future to raise her, because if the future was good enough for Cable, then goshdarnit, it’s good enough for his adopted daughter.

Cable and Hope return from the future in 2010’s “Second Coming,” which is largely a battle of military wits between Cyclops – who by now has turned the remaining mutants into a paramilitary strike team all living on the same island off San Francisco – and Bastion – who has resurrected all your favorite mutant-haters, from Cameron Hodge to Graydon Creed. The good guys win, but at a pretty hefty price: Both Cable and Nightcrawler are killed (obviously they've both since gotten better). The story ends with Cerebra registering five new blips, launching a series called Generation Hope that would last 17 issues.

Internecine strife (lowercase, with an i) among the X-Men reaches a boiling point in 2011’s Schism miniseries by Jason Aaron, which saw Cyclops and Wolverine break the X-Men into two different camps, one of which stayed on the island off San Fran and the other of which rebuilt the Xavier Institute and renamed it the Jean Grey School, in a split that remains to this day.

For more good guys fighting good guys, stop by later this week for a look at the Bendis age of Avengers crossovers, from Disassembled to A vs. X.

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 4: X-Cutioner’s Song to Age of Apocalypse: More X-overs

For more than a year from the debut of X-Men #1 in fall 1991, the X-books remained crossover-free. The interim saw some creative upheaval, with Chris Claremont, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and John Byrne all leaving, and Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza becoming the main architects of the X-verse, with new names like Andy Kubert and Greg Capullo coming up on art.

The new crew got their first big story in 1992’s “X-Cutioner’s Song,” a 12-part event that spanned Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Force, and X-Factor. The main antagonist of the Song was Stryfe, the pointy, silver-suited supervillain who had shown up about the same time as Cable, the paramilitary leader who turned the New Mutants into X-Force. Stryfe is out for revenge on a number of important X-characters, including Professor X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Cable and Apocalypse. Late in the story, he appears to reveal himself as the baby Cyclops sent to the future in X-Factor #68, all grown up. This is later debunked, with Cable proven to be the child and Stryfe the clone. Stryfe is defeated, but in a last act of villainy tricks Mister Sinister into releasing the Legacy Virus, a disease that will go on to kill a number of mutants. He also unleashes Stryfe’s Strike File upon the world, so that’s two posthumous F-Yous.

In 1993, after 30 years of existing, Magneto gets to be the main bad guy of a crossover. “Fatal Attractions” sees Big M build a new orbiting space base, regain control of the Acolytes from Fabian Cortez and invite along any X-Men who would like to completely isolate themselves from civilization. Colossus bites, getting up in the middle of his sister’s funeral (she died of the Legacy Virus) to join the X-Men’s sworn enemy. Professor X launches an attack on Magneto’s new digs, which results in Magneto ripping the adamantium from Wolverine’s body, which remains one of the most badass things I’ve seen in a comic. Xavier responds by turning Magneto into a vegetable. Wolverine – whose claws are revealed to have been part of his skeleton all along – leaves the team to go find himself.

Magneto’s goons weren’t done playing with the X-Men, though. “Fatal Attractions” was quickly followed by “Bloodties,” an X-Men/Avengers story in which Fabian Cortez, the former leader of the Acolytes, kidnaps Luna, Magneto’s granddaughter by Quicksilver and the Inhuman Crystal, and foments civil unrest in Genosha, which can’t get its act together in a post "X-tinction Agenda" world. Things go from bad to worse when Exodus, Magneto’s current capo di mutie, shows up and drops and big-ol’ psionic dome over the Genoshan capital. The good guys win, but the Avengers lose their U.N. charter for interfering in Genoshan political stuff.

As the crossovers continue through the years, the number of X-books expands, and writers and editors struggle to spread the events to all the books in the line, as opposed to three or four books. “The Phalanx Covenant,” for example, is spread out over Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Cable, and Wolverine (By today’s standards, that’s a downright reasonable number of X-books. Scary). The Phalanx are a techno-organic alien race that crept on the scene immediately after Fatal Attractions (and who would many years later team up with Ultron to menace the Kree Emprie in Annihilation: Conquest), assimilating thought-dead characters such as Stephen Lang, Cameron Hodge, Doug Ramsey and Candy Southern. At the opening of the covenant, the Phalanx have taken the X-Men, and it’s up to a B-team made up of Banshee, Emma Frost, Jubilee and Sabretooth to gather more mutants, specifically the team that would become Generation X. Elsewhere, Cyclops and Jean Grey, fresh from their honeymoon in the future raising Baby Cable, team up with long-rogue Wolverine and Adult Cable to shoot, snikt, teke-blast, and eyeball-laser their way to the rest of the X-Men. The ancillary teams, meanwhile (Factor, Force and Calibur), are charged with figuring out a way to stop the Phalanx on Earth from contacting reinforcements from their home planet.

Just a few short months later, Xavier’s son, Legion, goes back in time and accidentally kills his father (he was gunning for Magneto), forking the timestream and creating everyone’s favorite Age, “The Age of Apocalypse.” For 30 years, Bishop is trapped in a world where Apocalypse rules all of North America, Magneto leads the X-Men, Cyclops has one eye, Wolverine has one hand, Colossus has one red do-rag and so-on. All the X-books, right down to the just-started Generation X, were put on hold for four months to create an alternate reality that Marvel’s revisited a couple times since and is making part of the Secret Wars’ Battleworld. Uncanny and adjectiveless X-Men became Astonishing and Amazing X-Men and were about Magento’s core team. X-Force became Gambit & the Xternals, in which the thief is hired to swipe the Shi’ar M’Kraan Crystal. X-Factor became Factor X, about the Summers Brothers working for Mr. Sinister. Excalibur became X-Calibre, about Nightcrawler’s adventures in the Savage Land. Generation X became Generation Next, about a team of young mutants overseen by Colossus and Kitty Pryde. Wolverine became Weapon X, about Wolverine and Jean Grey running covert ops. And Cable became X-Man, about the genetically engineered child of Scott Summers and Jean Grey. In the end, Magneto (quite awesomely) kills Apocalypse, and four characters – Nate Grey, Holocaust, the Sugar Man and the AoA version of the Beast – escape to the restored 616 reality. As a result, the X-Man series became an ongoing. For those of you keeping score at home, that means we’re up to nine ongoing X-titles, plus the quarterly X-Men Unlimited.

In our next installment, we’ll traipse through yet more X-overs, from Onslaught as far as my self-imposed word counts will allow. Expect Bastion to show up a lot.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events Part 3- Cosmic Crossovers from The Infinity Gauntlet to The Annihilation Wave and Beyond

While it can be argued that the original Secret Wars was Marvel's first cosmic crossover, after all the Beyonder is a pretty cosmic threat, the threat still was mostly directed just at Earth. Something like the "Dark Phoenix Saga" had a loftier scale, with the Phoenix a threat so great it called down cosmic empires. So for me, the era of the cosmic crossover didn't start until 1991, when Jim Starlin made his grand entrance to the crossover stage with The Infinity Gauntlet.

I've written about The Inifinity Gauntlet multiple times in multiple ways, but long story short: Thanos gets the six Infinity Gems (yes, gems. It might be stones in Super Hero Squad and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's still gems in the comics). Thanos becomes a god. Thanos kills half the universe. Heroes fight Thanos. He kills heroes. Cosmic beings fight Thanos. Thanos captures or destroys them. Nebula steals the Gauntlet. Thanos joins with heroes to stop Nebula. Adam Warlock winds up with Gauntlet. Thus endeth the lesson.

It's a well regarded, well remembered crossover from first of the cosmic masterminds, Jim Starlin, with art by George Perez (who you might remember from another crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths) and Ron Lim.. While Thanos had been appearing in Silver Surfer for over a year, this is what brought him to the main stage of the Marvel Universe, and took a villain whose appearances could be counted on both hand and both feet of two people suddenly became a villain who was central to the Marvel Universe. It also resurrected Adam Warlock, Pip the Troll, and Gamora, three other Starlin characters (Warlock is technically a Lee/Kirby character, but Starlin's Warlock is about as similar to Lee/Kirby's as he is to Reed Richards) who would be part of the center of the cosmic Marvel Universe for the next few years, and the other two parts of Starlin's Infinity trilogy.

Starlin and Lim return in 1992, which saw the debut of The Infinity War. Following up on plot threads from The Infinity Gauntlet, when Warlock was briefly the lord of creation, he cast all good and evil from himself, thinking this would make him an impartial deity. What it really did was help give birth to the Magus, the embodiment of Warlock's evil, who took the name and skin color of the dark future version of Warlock from the classic Starlin tales. The Magus's plan is one of those incredibly windy, Machiavellian ones that has about four levels of wheels within wheels, but it involves creating evil doppelgangers of pretty much every superhero and sending them out against their opposites to replace them. There are four different factions all investigating the Magus's plot: the Infinity Watch (Warlock's team who each got an Infinity Gem when he divided up the gauntlet); Galactus and his merry band of the Silver Surfer, Nova (his herald at the time, an Earth girl made into a fiery cosmic being, not the cosmic hero of New Warriors and later cosmic events fame); the heroes of Earth; and Dr. Doom and Kang.

Starlin does a lot of writing here about duality, about how we all have multiple versions of ourselves, some more divergent than others. For instance, Thanos's evil doppelganger is pretty much just Thanos. While the story is fun, it's much busier than Infinity Gauntlet, much more involved, and you almost wipe your brow in relief when all the threads come together. This was a big crossover with lots of issues where heroes fought their doppelgangers. Notable ones included Spider-Man #24, where Spider-Man's six armed doppelganger would survive and become part of "Maximum Carnage" and issues of Fantastic Four, where Sue Storm fought, defeated, and accepted her dark doppelganger, leading to the infamous Invisible Woman costume that had so many cut outs it might as well be an Emma Frost costume.

And if the Magus was Warlock's evil side, what happened to the good side? Well, that was the Goddess, who was the central antagonist of the final third of the Infinity trilogy, 1993's The Infinity Crusade. Powered by a couple dozen cosmic containment units (Cosmic Cubes of many shapes), the Goddess goes about recreating Counter Earth, the Earthlike planet that used to orbit the sun at the exact opposite point of Earth, turns it into a garden of Eden, and then populates it with superpeople from Earth she considers worthy. The Goddess's goal, she claims, is to rid the universe of evil. Sounds good, right? Well, pure good not balanced with anything is as destructive as poor evil, and again we get various factions fighting each other, including Goddess's heroes, the remaining heroes now forced to fight their friends, and Thanos and Warlock teamed up with Mephisto.

If you've read pretty much anything Starlin has ever written, you know he has a thing about organized religion, and the Goddess, with that name plus a giant cathedral and seeking people of faith, is clearly part of the evil religious figures that Starlin has created. This does have a really great last scene, one of those perfectly plotted little twists that makes you smile when you realize it was all there from the beginning.

After Infinity Crusade, the cosmic aspects of the Marvel Universe cooled off. Warlock and the Infinity Watch ended about a year and a half later, with Starlin having jumped ship about a year before. Warlock was sent over the the Ultraverse for a while, and needed a few years away to lose the stench of the epic failure. Thanos became a much more rote cosmic baddy, losing mos if Starlin's nuance. Starlin eventually came back, wrote the  self contained mini-series Infinity Abyss and Marvel Universe: The End, and the first six issues of a Thanos ongoing. When Starlin left that series, Keith Giffen took it over, and also wrote a four issue mini-series for another Starlin character, Drax the Destroyer. These two stories led into the renaissance for Marvel's cosmic corner.

Annihilation was released in 2006, so it was well over a decade after the Infinity trilogy. A war fleet led by Annihilus, the insect-like ruler of the Negative Zone (an antimatter universe) from Fantastic Four, comes into the normal Marvel Universe and starts systematically destroying everything. Since theer were no cosmic ongoings at the time, the crossover was instead handled as a prologue one shot followed by four mini-series, Nova, Ronan the Accuser, Silver Surfer, and Super-Skrull, that funneled into a single mini-series, Annihilation, where a ragtag group of rebels, led by Nova (which will be Richard Rider for the remainder of this article), must fight back the Annihilation Wave. The scale is huge, but the series itself is small, just six issues, and Giffen and artist Andrea Devito use every page to the best effect. It's action packed, it's heart wrenching, and it's exciting. Annihilation gave birth to a new Nova series, which was used to springboard another three events that made up the new era of cosmic Marvel.

The year after Annihilation began, it's sequel launched. Annihilation: Conquest saw the Kree Empire invaded by the techno-organic alien race, the Phalanx, who had fallen under the sway of this summer's Spaderyest villain, Ultron. Once again, a ragtag group of heroes have to face down the big bad. This event followed the same format as Annihilation, with a one shot and then four four issue arcs, but this time one of those stories took place in the recently launched Nova ongoing. The other three were Wraith (a new character, created by Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach), Quasar (starring Captain Mar-Vell's daughter, Phyla, and returning Adam Warlock to life), and Star-Lord by previous Annihilation mastermind, Keith Giffen. Conquest was another exciting, world spanning cosmic piece, and Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (DnA for short), who wrote it as well as the Annihilation: Nova mini-series and the Nova ongoing, get a lot of credit for their strong characters and wild sci-fi ideas, which is deserved. However, I want to call out Keith Giffen, whose contributions tend to be forgotten. He did write Annihilation, and while I have a feeling DnA might have picked the characters, it was in Giffen's Star-Lord mini-series that Marvel fandom was reintroduced to Mantis, Bug, and two other then little known characters, Rocket Raccoon and Groot, who appeared in a little movie that came out last summer.

With all the key players in place, this book launched a second cosmic series by DnA, this one the launchpad for that movie I just mentioned, Guardians of the Galaxy, which not only featured the moive team of five, but Adam Warlock, Quasar, Bug, Mantis, Jack Flag, Major Victory. and Cosmo, the Russian cosmonaut dog who appeared in the Collector's menagerie in the movie. The next cosmic event broke the pattern established by the Annihilation event, both in naming and format.

War of Kings was the Game of Thrones of cosmic events. Two of the great outer space empires, the Kree and the Shi'ar, went to war, with the Shi'ar currently under the control of Vulcan, the incredibly powerful and totally insane third Summer brother of long lost X-Men storyline, the Kree had recently been conquered by the Inhumans; so in a very meta way, it's a forerunner of Marvel's current publishing issues with mutants versus Inhumans. The lead in to this story took place in Guardians and Nova, along with a mini-series called X-Men: Kingbreaker, featuring the Starjammers and a group of X-Men who were fighting Vulcan, and War of Kings: Darkhawk, a mini-series that established a tin between the 90s hero Darkhawk's alien armor and the Shi'ar.

The core mini-series dealt mostly with the war, and featured a lot of the Inhuman royal family, Vulcan and the Shi'ar Impreial Guard, and Lilandra, the deposed Shi'ar ruler, and the Strajammers. Nova and his newly reformed Nova Corps took up the battle in his title, while the over in their title, the Guardians tried to stop the War in their title, as they had been warned the war would have dire consequences. As the series moved to its cataclysmic end, the Guardians failed, and Vulcan and Black Bolt were seemingly killed as a massive bomb, meant to obliterate the Shi'ar, exploded, tearing a hole in space dubbed The Fault. Only by sacrificing himself does Adam Warlock stop The Fault from eating all of the universe, but in so doing he finally gives in to the future and becomes Adam Magus.

War of Kings led into a branding called Realm of Kings. It was like the Dark Reign banners that ran through much of Marvel for some time; not really a crossover, but more telling readers that these stories had something to tie them together. The Fault becomes the principle problem, and investigating it shows that it ties the Marvel Universe to a malignant other universe filled with undying monster versions of this reality. The Universe is dubbed the Cancerverse, and is a place wheer Death has been killed, meaning nothing can die and it has used up all its space and needs to expand. While Nova and the Shi'ar investigate, the Guardians are forced to deal with the Universal Church of Truth, the body created by, and once more under the control of, Adam Magus. It turns out the Magus is trying to throw open The Fault and let the Many-Angled Ones (Cthulhu like monsters) and their converted servants in. And he succeeds, but not before the Guardians find a cocoon like the one Warlock hibernates in, and from it emerges Thanos, long thought dead after the end of Annihilation.

The final act of this period of Marvel's cosmic dramas was The Thanos Imperative. While Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy had cult followings, their sales were middling, and so they both ended with Realm of Kings, and everything was wrapped up in a six issue mini-series with two bookend one shots. The Cancerverse Revengers, led by a corrupted Captain Mar-Vell, begin invading the Marvel Universe, and kill Adam Magus immediately for failing to kill Thanos. The various cosmic forces fight a holding action, trying to keep the Cancerverse forces, and the universe itself, from advancing far from The Fault, while the Guardians, Nova, and Thanos enter the Cancerverse, as Thanos's close relationship with Death will allow him to reawaken it/her in that universe and stop the spread. It's a tense battle, full of epic cosmic figures, and DnA threw everything they could into this last cosmic tale. In the end, the heroes succeed, but not without a cost: Drax is killed by Thanos, and as the Cancerverse collapses, Thanos, Star-Lord, and Nova are seemingly trapped forever in the what remains of it.

And that's it. There were a couple of follow-up mini-series for a new cosmic team called the Annihilators, set up to be the opposite of the scruffy Guardians who fought by wits, instead being made up of incredibly powerful characters, but they didn't really take off, despite being good stories and having great Rocket and Groot back-ups. A couple years after that, with Thanos revealed as the big bad at the end of Avengers that Thanos and the Guardians returned in Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagely's Avengers Assemble, which set up all that's come since.

Later this week, come back for Part four, where Dan returns to take you through the next batch of X-Men events.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events Part 2- Mutant Massacre to Muir Island Saga- The Crossovers of Chris Claremont

These days, a month that goes by without more than a dozen X-books weaving stories into each other is an anomaly. But 30 years ago, in that strange time known as the 1980s, such a thing was a novel idea.

Back then, Chris Claremont was in charge of nearly all the mutants and two ongoing series: Uncanny X-Men and the New Mutants. The original five X-Men, however – Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman and Angel – were under the purview of Louise Simonson in the earliest incarnation of X-Factor.

What brought these three teams (and also Thor and Power Pack) back together in 1986? Genocide. A new group called the Marauders was slaughtering the Morlocks, a community of mutants that lived in the sewers below New York. The Mutant Massacre was one of Claremont’s darkest, most violent stories to date, and had some of the most lasting effects on the X-books. Angel’s wings were broken and later amputated, leading him to become Apocalypse’s Horseman Death. Nightcrawler and Shadowcat were injured and left the team to recuperate on Muir Island, which led to them co-founding a new team, Excalibur. In their place would come Psylocke and, later, Dazzler and Longshot. Sabretooth – a Claremont creation ported over from his run on Iron Fist – would stake a claim as a major X-villain and specifically an arch-nemesis of Wolverine. The Marauders’ employer would later be revealed as Mr. Sinister, the mad geneticist obsessed with the Summers bloodline. The Massacre would also later be tied in to the backstory of Gambit, who would not appear in the comics for another four years.

Next, in 1988, came Fall of the Mutants, which wasn’t so much a crossover as a label that appeared on the three main X-books but was considered a major event nonetheless, not the least so because the X-Men died … for about a minute.

The X-Men and Madelyne Pryor sacrificed themselves fighting the Adversary, a Native American demon god linked to Forge, during a battle in Dallas. Upon vanquishing their foe, Roma, the daughter of Merlin, resurrected them, made them invisible to technology (a plot thread that, near as I can tell, just sort of disappeared) and gave them access to the Siege Perilous, a one-time transporter that, once a person passes through it, basically gives them a new life somewhere else with no memories of their previous one until such time as a writer finds that inconvenient. Meanwhile, in X-Factor, the team fights Death, aka Archangel, and breaks him of Apocalypse’s control, and in New Mutants, Doug Ramsey, aka Cypher, is shot and killed by The Right, an anti-mutant group led by Cameron Hodge, whose name will pop up a few more times in this post.

The following year brought an Inferno to the streets of New York in a convoluted plot involving, in no particular order, the demons of Limbo, inanimate objects coming to life, Pryor becoming the underboob-exposing Goblin Queen, Colossus’ sister Illyana being reverted from a magic-wielding sorceress back to a child, Hodge making a deal with demons for immortality, a number of babies – including the baby that would grow up to be Cable – being stolen to complete a spell, Pryor being revealed as a clone of Jean Grey created by Mr. Sinister, the Spider-Man villain Hobgoblin becoming a demon, another demon getting infected with Warlock’s Transmode Virus, the X-Men and X-Factor fighting each other, and the X-Mansion being destroyed again. Inferno cast a wide net, stretching from the X-books to Spider-Man and Daredevil to, quite sensibly, Damage Control, the Marvel Universe’s post-event cleanup crew. And Power Pack. Those kids got a lot of hangtime in the ’80s.

Hodge surfaces again in 1990 as a creepy spider-robot with a human face pulling the strings on the mutant-enslaving island of Genosha in The X-Tinction Agenda. By this point, Jim Lee was drawing Uncanny X-Men and Rob Liefeld had come aboard New Mutants, so we’re starting to see some of the deck-clearing exercises that will pave the way for X-Men #1 and X-Force #1 a few months down the line. Some of the X-Men who went through the Siege Perilous are reunited. Cable has taken over the New Mutants. Storm is restored from her de-aged self back to an adult weather goddess, and she introduces everyone to the creepy Cajun friend she made while evading the Shadow King. Havok is revealed to have been working as a Genoshan magistrate. Wolfsbane of the New Mutants is turned into a Genoshan mutate, or slave. Warlock is killed. A bunch of people see former British woman Psylocke as an Asian ninja for the first time. And the Genoshan government is toppled – literally; Rictor destroys their Citadel.

The Claremont age ends in summer 1991 with a mini-crossover called the Muir Island Saga that straddles Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor. The Saga served a few goals: It wrapped up a long-running (there’s no other kind with Claremont) arc involving the Shadow King; it re-crippled Xavier; it reunited the X-Men with their original members to form an all-killer, no-filler superteam that would need two books to hold them; and it transitioned X-Factor from a book about the original five X-Men to a book about a government-sponsored mutant team written by Peter David. If you have any affection for Jamie Madrox, Strong Guy or Polaris, it starts in X-Factor #70.

Next week, Matt takes us into space for some cosmic crossovers, so bring your favorite Infinity Gem and prepare to get Annihilated.

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events - Part 1: Secret Wars and Annual Events

Welcome to the first of a multipart series breaking down the history of Marvel’s many crossovers, from 1984’s Secret Wars to 2015’s Secret Wars. For the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the highs and the lows of the company’s biggest events, the stories that had you saying everything from “Oh man, the Watcher just showed up; this must be important” to “I don’t care who’s in it, I’m not buying this Moon Knight Infinity Crusade tie-in issue.”

The original Marvel crossover event series, 1984’s 12-issue Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, came about because Marvel needed a toy line. Then Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter has been on record as saying Mattel wanted to produce a toy line for Marvel, but only if Marvel could tie it to a publishing event. Also, focus-grouped children really like the words “secret” and “wars.” So Shooter and artists Mike Zeck and Bob Layton crafted a story that was the rough equivalent of what happens when my 3-year-old pulls out his Imaginext figures: All the good guys and all the bad guys fight each other.

The wars start after an entity called the Beyonder pulls a whole bunch of good guys and bad guys to a place called Battleworld and makes them fight. Among the heroes are Monica Rambeau, Storm, Captain America, Mr. Fantastic, the Wasp, the Hulk, Cyclops, Professor X, Wolverine, Thor, the Thing, Iron Man, Rogue, Spider-Man, a not-yet-converted Magneto, She-Hulk, Hawkeye, Colossus, Nightcrawler and the Human Torch. Repping the bad guys were Galactus, the Enchantress, Ultron, the Absorbing Man, the Wrecking Crew, the Lizard, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Doom, Kang and Molecule Man.

Amid all the fighting, a few significant things happen. Spider-Man gets a new black costume you may be familiar with. Colossus falls in love with an alien and subsequently breaks the heart of Kitty Pryde, who was too young for him anyway. The Thing decides to hang out in space for a while, and She-Hulk takes his place on the Fantastic Four. Subsequently, Alicia Masters starts dating the Human Torch, but it’s later revealed “Alicia” was really a Skrull named Lyja.

A sequel the following year by Shooter and Al Milgrom saw the Beyonder come to Earth, tick off Mephisto, work as a mob enforcer and hit on totally ’80s mutants Dazzler and Boom-Boom.

The next companywide crossovers would take place in Marvel’s annuals – double-sized, multistory issues that come out once a year with their own numbering sequence. In 1988 and 1989, the annuals told one sweeping story across a vast number of books. The following three years, they were broken down into groups of three to five.

Marvel’s 1988 crossover was called “The Evolutionary War.” The main baddie of the war was the High Evolutionary, a guy in a pink metal suit who lives on a mountain and likes to experiment on people in the name of evolution. As evolution-based Marvel villains go, the High Evolutionary ranks pretty low on the list, certainly below the big guy in the blue armor who’s obsessed with survival of the fittest and the albino with the red diamond on his forehead and the fringed cape who commands an army of cloned Marauders.

Speaking of Apocalypse, "The Evolutionary War" actually begins in X-Factor with the High Evolutionary arguing philosophies and fighting with En Sabah Nur. It goes on to include the Punisher, Silver Surfer, New Mutants, Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men, Web of Spider-Man, West Coast Avengers, Spectacular Spider-Man, Avengers, and, finally, the 1980s sitcom alien, Alf. Guys, Alf met the High Evolutionary. Not only that, his Highness tried to tie the explosion of Alf’s home planet, Melmac, to the Phoenix Force.

Marvel tried a second companywide annual crossover in 1989 with “Atlantis Attacks,” a story about a ridiculous plot to revive an ancient serpent god that at some point involves the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. “Attacks” upped the ante from the Evolutionary War, consisting of 14 books to the previous story’s 11 (not including Alf). Books involved include Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Uncanny X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man, Punisher, Spectacular Spider-Man, Daredevil, Avengers, New Mutants, X-Factor, Web of Spider-Man, West Coast Avengers, Thor, and Fantastic Four.

1990’s annuals were broken up by family. “Days of Future Present” crossed over Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, and Fantastic Four. “Lifeform” crossed over the Punisher, Daredevil, Incredible Hulk, and Silver Surfer. “Spidey’s Totally Tiny Adventure” traversed the three Spider-Man books. And “The Terminus Factor” crossed over Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Avengers, and West Coast Avengers.

1991 gave us “The Von Strucker Gambit” (Captain America, Daredevil, Punisher), “The Korvac Quest” (Fantastic Four, Thor, Silver Surfer, Guardians of the Galaxy), “Kings of Pain” (New Mutants, New Warriors, Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor), “The Vibranium Vendetta” (the Spidey titles) and “Subterranean Wars” (Avengers, Hulk, Namor, Iron Man, West Coast Avengers).

Finally, 1992 saw “Shattershot” (Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force), “Return of the Defenders” (Hulk, Silver Surfer, Namor, Dr. Strange), “The System Bytes” (Punisher, Daredevil, Wonder Man, Guardians of the Galaxy), “Assault on Armor City” (Iron Man, Darkhawk, West Coast Avengers), “The Hero Killers” (the Spideys and New Warriors), and “Citizen Kang” (Captain America, Avengers, Thor, Fantastic Four).

In Part 2, we’ll tackle the X-crossovers of the 1980s and early 1990s, from the "Mutant Massacre" to "The Muir Island Saga." Expect the X-books to take up an outsize portion of this series.

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

An Annual Event: A History of Crossover Events in DC Comics Part 3

Welcome back to our final installment of the history of events in DC Comics. This final installment talks about the crossovers and theme years of the Annuals, the oversized comics that were published, obviously, once a year. Originally, this was done to get around certain publishing and postal regulations about magazines, but over the years, as these rules were relaxed and books could come out more than once a month, the annual faded from prominence. Annuals used to be a big deal, especially over at Marvel. Many landmarks happened in those massive Stan Lee-era annuals. The Sinister Six made it's first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1, and Reed and Sue got married in Fantastic Four Annual #3 While I can't recall any such huge events in DC Comics annuals, you still got Alan Moore writing Batman in Batman Annual #11 and Superman in Superman Annual #11, so there are some pretty great stories in those earlier annuals.

But in 1991, DC tried to get some extra buzz going on their annuals. Marvel had been doing company crossovers in their annuals for a few years, and so DC decided to give it a try with...

Armageddon 2001, bookends (issues at the beginning and end of the series, with the crossovers doing the heavy lifting in the middle) written by Archie Goodwin and with art by Dan Jurgens, was a classic sci-fi dystopia story. In the year 2030 the world is ruled by Monarch, an armor clad conqueror who is said to once have been a great superhero who turned on his own, and wiped them all out in the year 2001. Matthew Ryder, a scientist in that time, travels back in time to find out who Monarch was and to stop him from becoming the despot. Transformed into a being of pure time energy called Waverider, he arrives in 1991 and goes about encountering as many heroes as he can, and by touching them, he sees their possible futures.

This is a really fun conceit, as it allows for all these stories of the heroes in the future, What If? or Elseworlds type stories, but they have a little more resonance because they are presented as actual possible futures. Of course, Waverider learns the classic time travel trope that if you interact with the past it can change things, so he has to touch some (more popular) heroes multiple times to see if he's actually created Monarch. The ending of the crossover is legendary, as the original ending, that Captain Atom was Monarch, was leaked, and so a quick change was made to make the much less logical ending that Hawk of Hawk & Dove was in fact Monarch. A great event was somewhat spoiled by this quick change, but it's still my favorite full scale annual crossover.

Some of the annuals are really solid stories. Superman Annual #3 is one of the early examples in the Modern Age of a trope that's gotten stale now, where Superman is corrupted and has to be stopped. Since it's 1991, it's one of the first comics to riff on the classic conclusion of Dark Knight Returns, inverting the final battle between Superman and Batman. Justice League America Annual #5 steps back from the darkness of the Breakdown story happening at the time to tell a series of very funny vignettes. New Titans Annual #7 introduced a team of Titans from the future who came back in time later to form the Team Titans, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time. And Flash Annual #5 tells the story of Wally West coming out of retirement and witness protection to save his son from old enemies in a story written by a fresh young writer named Mark Waid a year before his legendary run on The Flash would begin.

The 1992 annual event was Eclipso: The Darkness Within, bookends written by Robert Loren Fleming and Keith Giffen with art from Bart Sears. This story took Eclipso, a C-List villain from 60s villain who was the Hyde to solar scientist Bruce Gordon's Jekyll, and made him a world beater by revealing he's not just Gordon's dark side, but is in fact an ancient vengeance god who has been trapped on the dark side of the moon in a castle for centuries, and is now making a play for his freedom. To do this, the black diamonds that hold Eclipso's earthly essence begin to posses and control super beings so Eclipso can gather an army.

This series gives a lot of classic hero on hero action, as various heroes and their allies become possessed by black diamonds. The black diamonds in some cases don't possess characters but create monsters made of the anger of the holder. So if you ever wanted to watch Jim Gordon vomit up a smoke monster to go kill the Joker, you can check out Detective Comics Annual #5. I'm being glib, but it's actually a solid event, and Eclipso is made into a really solid threat.

There was also some very distinct fallout from this series. Eclipso remains a major part of the DC Universe to today, having an ongoing that spun out of this series that had some ripples. That series brought Amanda Waller back from limbo, was an early example of a DC trend where a squad of B- and C-list heroes raided Eclipso's fortress and were mercilessly wiped out, and had a great two part story in issues seven and eight where Eclipso fought Sherlock Holmes in Victorian London. He showed up after that series in John Ostarnder's The Spectre, Geoff Johns's run on JSA, and James Robinson's run on Justice League of America. He has appeared in a few places in the New 52 as well. The series also seemingly killed off Will Payton, the sixth Starman, setting the stage for Jack Knight to take the name, and making the quest for what really happened to Payton a key point on James Robinson's seminal Starman.

Bloodlines was... well, not either of these previous two events. Large, spinal fluid sucking aliens arrive on Earth and begun feeding on the populace. If you happen to survive the encounter, you get superpowers. Seemingly random powers; it's not a consistent set. This was an attempt to create a batch of popular new characters. It did not succeed in that. Instead of having bookends like the previous two events, Bloodlines culminated in a two issue mini-series called Bloodbath, written by Dan Raspler with art by Chuck Wotjkiewicz and Sal Velutto, where these New Blood heroes joined the other DC heroes to stop the parasites.

Of the 27 annuals, six individual titles were spun off, as well as a team called Blood Pack. Most of these were mini-series, and of the three ongoings, two ended pretty quickly. The only real breakout success was Hitman, the irreverent story of Tommy Monaghan,written by Garth Ennis and drawn by John McCrea, who debuted in Demon Annual #2, and whose series ran 60 issues plus an annual and some specials. Some of these characters, like Flash Annual #6 debut Argus, were pretty decent characters, but it seemed they couldn't escape the Bloodlines stigma. One favorite Bloodlines moment is in Hitman #1,000,000, a tie-in to DC One Million, where Tommy is pulled into the far future by hero fanboys, where he confronts Gunfire 1,000,000, the long distant inheritor of the title of a New Blood hero who could turn anything he touched into an energy or explosive weapon, who Tommy shoots and embarrasses, and who dies from inadvertently turning first his medpack into an explosive, and then, well, let's say his last words are, "Oh my God, I turned my ass into a hand-grenade--" Garth Ennis, everybody.

After Bloodlines less than stellar success, DC changed it's tactic. Instead of going with full on crossovers, it's annuals started having themes. The first years of themed annuals were all Elseworlds tales, where the heroes of the books were put in unusual settings and time periods. As with a lot of Elseworlds stories, these were hit and miss, but there were some highlights. Detective Comics Annual #7, from Chuck Dixon and Enrique Alcatena, told of Leatherwing, Batman as a privateer fighting a pirate version of Joker. This was actually a world adapted by Grant Morrison as part of the 52 Earths in Multiversity. Karl Kesel told a two part stories of the DC heroes in a dystopian future in Adventures of Superman Annual #6 and Superboy Annual #1. And the modern Batman learns he had a predecessor in Renaissance Italy in a story involving Leonardo da Vinci in Batman Annual #18.

Skipping a bit ahead, 1997 annuals were also Elseworlds themed, this time specifically called "Legends of the Dead Earth" which all take place in the far distant future where the heroes are legends in the same way the Greek heroes are to us, and we see some very interesting variants on classic themes and heroes, some very magical, some very sci-fi. The one that sticks out in my head is Aquaman Annual #2, where Peter David tells the story of two men meeting and sharing their conflicting versions of the history of Aquaman, only to reveal they both believe themselves to be his direct descendant and begin fighting, thus continuing the brother versus brother theme that pervaded David's entire Aquaman run from Atlantis Chronicles onward.

The year in between the two Elseworlds themes was for "Year One" annuals. This was a somewhat perplexing choice, as some heroes had long established early years (like Superman in John Byrne's Man of Steel, Batman in Batman: Year One, and Flash in Mark Waid's first arc on Flash called "Born to Run"), while many others had origins retold less than two years earlier in the zero issues that followed Zero Hour. But what this allowed was for the creators to get, well, creative. Mark Waid spent time in his annual focusing not on Wally West's first year as a hero, but his first year as the Flash after Barry Allen's death. Each Batman annual focused on the first year of a particular villain. The Superman annuals focused on various firsts for Superman, like his first trip into space and his first confrontation with magic.

But some annuals stretch farther to make for substantive changes. Since we watched Jean-Paul Valley become Azrael, Azrael Annual #1 focused on Jean-Paul's father, the previous Azrael, and fleshed out a character who only appeared on a few pages before this. The Superboy Annual revealed that Paul Westfield, the evil director of Project Cadmus, was in fact the human half of Superboy's DNA (later retconned by Geoff Johns to be Lex Luthor. Superboy probably should have been happier when he thought it was Westfield). And New Titans Annual #11 tried to clear up some of the time travel hi-jinks left over from Zero Hour concerning team members Terra and Mirage.

DC's final year of full Annual themes was Pulp Heores in 1998. Each of these annuals had a painted cover reminiscent of classic pulps and with pulp-like titles running down the left side of the cover (many drawn from old DC anthology titles), and a theme that went with that painted cover and title. Thus you got lots of adventure, detective, and western themed stories. Again, while most of these are not major continuity intense stories, they were a ton of fun. Hitman Annual #1 was "Weird Western Tales" and had a classic standoff tales with Tommy and his allies against a gang. Aquaman Annual #3 was "Suspence Detective" and has a Peter David story narrated like an old detective pulp, and has a very funny riff on Aquaman's old power limitation that he would die if he was out of the water for more than exactly one hour. Starman Annual #2, pictured above, was slightly different, as Jack Knight learns about the past love affairs of his friends and family as he has problems with his girlfriend, Sadie, and ends with a major revelation that would change the direction of the series.

The next three years had much smaller annual events. "Ghosts" and "JLApe" both only involved annuals for the big seven Justice Leaguers and the annual for JLA. The former featured the Justice League haunted by the spirits of people whose deaths they felt responsible for, so kind of a downer. The latter, though, featured the League fighting, and getting turned into, apes in a plot by Gorilla Grodd, so that was monumentally fun. The following year, 2000, was a series of Annuals called "Planet DC" that again tried to introduce new heroes, this time all from different nations. Most never appeared again.

Our final stop on this whirlwind tour is a bit more of a stretch. In 2001, DC started an event called Our Worlds at War, where a being called Imperiex was on his way to destroy Earth, and if he did so, it would bring about the end of all reality in a massive wave off entropy. The core of the series ran through the four Superman titles over the course of three months, with various other titles, including Batman and Young Justice, tying in. As there was no core mini-series, I left this out of the rundown of previous events, but thinking about it, I realized something. Many of the crossovers were oversized one-shots released over the course of those three summer months showing how the war effected other heroes. And that made me realize that those one-shots took the place of annuals that year, so I figured I'd include Our Worlds at War here.

Our Worlds at War was frankly kind of a mess. Imperiex's power set was nebulous, but so powerful that Darkseid actually teamed up with the heroes of Earth. Superman, the title that the series spun out of and was one of the core books of the event, had a narrative device where speeches by American presidents served as narration throughout, and cluttered up the pages on gorgeous Ed McGuiness art. And nearly all the character deaths and fallout, and there was quite a bit, was reversed almost immediately. While there was some very cool art and great space battles, this remains one of the more forgettable and somber events comics from DC.

In recent years, DC went back to publishing annuals, but kept them more tied to their parent titles, letting them wrap up big storylines or providing background to tie into the events of the ongoing. Thus the annual event and theme faded into the past, left for people like me to comment on in posts like this.

And that's it for our survey of event comics and the history of DC Comics. I hope you enjoyed it. But I hear some of you saying, "What about Marvel? Secret Wars is coming up and there have been plenty of Marvel events that are tying into that." Well to paraphrase someone intimately related to Marvel Comics, have no fear Matt Signal faithful! Next week, Dan Grote will begin a series of articles directly addressing Marvel crossovers (with me stepping in for one on the cosmic corner of the MU). So stay tuned for more.