DC Mega-events: rank your favorites
Comixfreek
Posts: 2
I'm going to say it: I liked Convergence! I know, it's not hip or cool to say you actually liked something in mainstream comics, but I do! I was a bit uncertain about this event and what it would be, but I have to say, after the several of the mini-series, I really got into the main story and went for the ride. It was great to see characters we haven't seen in a while (Donna Troy, Ryan Choi, Infinity Inc, Hawkman & Hawkwoman, Batman & The Outsiders) and the story reminded me of what attracted me to DC comics when I was a kid: the multiverse and multiple versions of classic DC comics super heroes.
So Convergence got me to thinking: how would I rank Convergence in relation to other mega-events that DC comics has put out over the past 30 years? Here as some of the mega-events I was thinking about:
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Armageddon 2001
Zero Hour: Crisis in Time
The Final Night
Identity Crisis
52
Countdown to Final Crisis
Final Crisis
Flashpoint
Convergence
I'd put Crisis, Identity Crisis, 52, Flashpoint & Convergence in my top 5 favorites.
Thoughts?
So Convergence got me to thinking: how would I rank Convergence in relation to other mega-events that DC comics has put out over the past 30 years? Here as some of the mega-events I was thinking about:
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Armageddon 2001
Zero Hour: Crisis in Time
The Final Night
Identity Crisis
52
Countdown to Final Crisis
Final Crisis
Flashpoint
Convergence
I'd put Crisis, Identity Crisis, 52, Flashpoint & Convergence in my top 5 favorites.
Thoughts?
Comments
Crisis
Armageddon 2001
Final Night
Identity Crisis
Flashpoint
Cosmic odyssey
Not sure it counts, but I would certainly put kingdom come at #1 for me and new frontier 2nd. Both well above any of the above.
Suicide Squad, Checkmate, Manhunter, Captain Atom and Firestorm.
Not quite a Mega-Event( more like cross-over) but I like the chance to pump it up when I can and the Suicide Squad parts was at the height of it's great run.
I have Kingdom Come and New Frontiers as Absolute editions, as well as All Star Superman. It may not be an event but it was 12 issues and is far superior to many, if not all, of the others.
Let me think on the series I enjoyed and didn't.
Honorable Mentions: DC: Invasion, Identity Crisis, Final Crisis (which somehow got better with age)(particularly Legion of Three Worlds), Zero Hour, and Final Night.
52
Identity Crisis
Blackest Night
Cosmic Odyssey
Armageddon 2001
COIE
Kingdom Come
Eclipso: The Darkness Within
Multiversity
Final Crisis
DC 1,000,000
Millenium
Countdown
Zero Hour
Final Crisis
On the fence about Blackest Night and Legends
A few points:
Jonn would not have stopped the explosion if he were with John. There wasn't enough time.
Superman comming across Orion's slaughter of the Thanagarians is the best part of the series. Orion used to be badass.
Does anyone know why it was so important to have Jason Blood be part of the story. I felt like I was missing some 1988 backstory.
Batman is still a precrisis Batman (can I use "precrisis" in a post-concergence era?). He can sure take a beating.
Starfire could have been anyone else.
Xanshi has an Arctic area, just like Earth.
The sequence of John contemplating suicide is great. Nice art work.
The New God's needed Jonn to read Metron's mind? There are no mind readers among the Gods?
A dude jumps through a parademon's gaping entry/exit wound.
I enjoyed the first few follow-ups: Legends and Millennium, both of which tried harder to create tie-ins that actually tied-in to the main story, a trickier task for Millennium, since it was a weekly.
Zero Hour had, to a degree, the same energy and feel as Crisis, and Final Night gave me a genuine feel of dread as the sun threatened to die out. Invasion was interesting, and gave us the concept of the metagene for the first time.
I thought Infinite Crisis was pretty well constructed, what with all of the interlocking mini-series that led up to it. Final Crisis was very good and entertaining, until it got to the last issues and Morrison fell to talking the story instead of letting the story tell itself.
Armageddon 2001 was a fun series that ran through all of the DC Annuals in 1991, and gave us a double track: the main story (Waverider looking for the hero who would betray and kill the others) and the alternate timeline stories of each hero's future. Too bad they had to change the ending at the last minute.
Bloodlines was in the middle range -- I liked the premise and a number of the stories, but the creation of a new hero or villain in every story got rather gimmicky, and danged few of these characters were ever used again. And for all of its faults (and there were many), I still kinda liked Countdown To Final Crisis.
Probably the worst were War Of The Gods (a Wonder Woman based event that got little support from most of the editors and creative teams from what I've heard, and which wound up getting tangled up into two or three other multi-book storylines at the same time) and Worlds At War (one of the worst Superman based events I'd ever read).
I love how fictional charachers are "not available".
"Sorry, he's on vacation at this time. Have you tried..."
I got into a lot of the post crisis dc 6/7 years ago when I was too broke to afford new books but could buy lots of 80s dc online/ebay for supercheap. It was kinda amazing and fun to dig into a lot of those books. And with the economy in the crapper it sort of felt like I was stealing them.
I actually liked Identity Crisis the most, as it was the most readable despite the insane thing that happened. 52 was also good.
Morrison lost me on Final Crisis, as did Johns on Infinite Crisis.
Didn't read most of the others. The thing I don't like about DC's big events is that they always seem to be "this changes everything" narratives, and when you "change everything" on an annual basis, it gets old. It would be like a soap opera doing a Luke and Laura wedding, every single summer.
Cripes.
It had he death of Batman:
And an awesome an awesome Spectre:
...he should stick to Thanos.
Both series also had some strong support and repercussions over in the ongoing Spectre series by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, which gamely took on the crossover and turned in some fine stories of their own.