When was the last Event or Crossover from the New 52 that you didn't describe as "went on too long"

[HsssH]

Forever Evil. It was delayed due to rewrites/slow art/whatever but I don't really think that it went too long.

[blunt_eastwood]

Given the fact that barely anything happened and they forgot to include an ending, I'd say that 7 issues was too much for Trinity War.

[cranger]

Events that dragged on are more likely to stick out in my mind, but I wonder if (other than the argument about what counts as a crossover) people find events are too long when they:

1) take too many issues to tell - seem to just include all sorts of tie ins for the sake of it
2) take too many months to tell - after so many months the excitement has died down
3) could be told in half the number of issues - after so many issues it seems like nothing has even happened yet

[Baggie_Saiyan]

Forever Evil
Throne of Atlantis

[thetrellan]

That's literally the definition. A story line and characters crossing over from one book to the other. Even though the books featured the same main character, the books had their own storylines which were abandoned for the CROSSOVER.

Well, I see someone found out how to change font size. Congrats on that.

But often books featuring the same character/s also feature the same story as a matter of course. That's the main reason for giving a single character multiple books to begin with. In such cases, it's not really a crossover, just a convenient way to continue the story so that the readers won't have to wait an entire month for the next installment. Only when the titles feature different characters is it considered a crossover event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_crossover and https://www.google.com/search?client...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 both back me up on this. Both use the word "discrete", meaning distinctly separate.

And don't even argue that the different Lantern books feature such different characters. We all know these books exist to expand GL's world, and often overlap because of it. That's why Guy changed to red. They are all Green Lantern books at heart, and exist primarily to expand upon what's going on with Hal and the GLC. As such, they were always headed toward the First Lantern story. Their individual story lines weren't abandoned because leading up to WFL was the very purpose of those story lines.

The Superman and Batman lines have always been even more closely connected. When Knightfall and Death of Superman were released, it was normal procedure for one title to pick up where its sister title left off. By your definition, they would have been in a state of almost constant crossover. But they weren't, because that's not the definition of a crossover.

Think about it. We never speak of a Detective Comics/Action Comics crossover. It's Batman/Superman crossover. And I don't know about you, but I don't consider it an event if it covers only 3 or 4 or even 6 (told over the course of 3 months) issues. Because "event" comes from the phrase "major event", and an occasional crossover of characters is as common as water, and has been since the 1960s. Nothing major at all.

Besides, I have a category box for crossover events, and they are all titles which exist only to tell the event. Like "Fear Itself", or "52". But here perhaps my definition narrows too much. Can't say for sure on that one.

[cranger]

In such cases, it's not really a crossover, just a convenient way to continue the story so that the readers won't have to wait an entire month for the next installment. Only when the titles feature different characters is it considered a crossover event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_crossover and https://www.google.com/search?client...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 both back me up on this.

Just keep in mind that Wiki article does not cite any sources. While I can see where that article is coming from the term crossover has commonly been used for any time a story continues in another title. Same with event, these are terms that have come into common uses but have never been rigidly defined. The X-Men books were popular for their crossover events with ones like Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants and Inferno only lasting 3 issues in their individual titles and sometimes barely sharing a common storyline. It is what it is and it seems everyone is more or less able to carry on the discussion using the terms as they are.

[DC Hero]

Even though I really enjoyed it, Doomed did it for me. I fell like it would have been a better one-month story since there was already some strong build-up and apparently a bit of decompression.

Snyder pushed the envelope with his Owls books, but I don't know if that truly qualifies as a cross-over since it was just the Bat family.

[JLange]

Blight crossover, Superman Doomed, Justice League Elite, World of New Krypton, Trials of Shazam, Countdown, Trinity.

[DC Hero]

I really feel like unless it's a Crisis, crossover events should only last a month. For the Justice League characters, it gives them 2-4 books of input, the rest could be added in.

I kind of wish DC did maybe two one-month cross-overs and one two month major event each year.

[Mar-Vell]

Exactly. The delay with issue 7 coming out did not make the entire event feel like it ran too long, it just made me REALLY want issue 7. Kinda like waiting for the end of 7 Soldiers.

That's exactly how I felt. Forever Evil is the best event I've read in a long, long time.

[thetrellan]

Just keep in mind that Wiki article does not cite any sources.

That's why I cited more than one source.

While I can see where that article is coming from the term crossover has commonly been used for any time a story continues in another title. Same with event, these are terms that have come into common uses but have never been rigidly defined. The X-Men books were popular for their crossover events with ones like Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants and Inferno only lasting 3 issues in their individual titles and sometimes barely sharing a common storyline. It is what it is and it seems everyone is more or less able to carry on the discussion using the terms as they are.

This is more usage than semantics anyway, which is why I feel compelled to discuss it.

However, Inferno spilled over into a lot of books, which more than doubled the size of the issue count. Much more, if I remember right.

That spillover is all that crossovers- not events, but the original crossover concept- used to be. You know, before the miniseries, and later the maxiseries, was invented. A Daredevil story began in his own book, Doom turned out to be the villain, so it continued in the Fantastic Four. In his own book there were just 2 issues to the arc, but it was a 3 issue story. If you missed FF #73, you were left wondering how DD returned to his own body.

It never even occurred to anyone at the time that a series could or should be produced with an intentionally finite issue count, or that a title could exist solely for the sake of telling a crossover, and end once the arc is over. Not for another decade at least.

Then again, DC had Marvel boxed into a distribution corner at the time. Marvel could only produce a set number of titles at any given time because DC controlled distribution.

Marvel's mutant titles tend not to be so closely intertwined, though, and in fact star different characters, so a tale that switches between those books could technically be called a crossover, even though I personally don't like it. As could Wrath, I confess, even though I still believe all those different colors only exist to support the Green part of the spectrum, so to speak.

[thetrellan]

Forever Evil actually did take too long for me. By the time it ended I had lost interest. I'm like "Hasn't this thing ended yet?" No, it hadn't.

And yes, I followed it pretty closely. But it really did drag. The story itself was too simple for the time it took to tell, even without delays, and too much time was spent with the JL in limbo, and Grayson held prisoner. It left me with the impression that DC was just stringing me along to sell me more comics (SOP, I know), so it became a dropping off point for Constantine and JLD.

Not just for me, but for the JLD artist too, apparently. Hell, if it weren't for Mankhe, I'd have dropped the entire Lantern line long ago. Now's probably a good time for that, now that I think of it. Justice League also.

The thing is, I don't think any title should be just a framework for the telling of other stories, and that's exactly what Forever Evil felt like. This could have been much better IMO.

[cranger]

This is more usage than semantics anyway, which is why I feel compelled to discuss it.

"Events" have gotten so out of hand I do not know if I could keep track of them even if there were proper terms. I mean, even Fall of the Mutants was an odd case. Each X-title told a completely separate story, but the X-Factor story had villains show up in a at least one other book, although so tangentially that the reader of the main story did not have to buy them and the readers of the tie in series could take them as just another random villain one-off. At least they seemed intended for the same purpose of cross promotion and not to pad their marketshare that month.

[blunt_eastwood]

I can agree that Forever Evil was too long. If you compare how much actually happened in the entire story to the number of issues needed to tell that much activity, it doesn't add up.

[Kapparition]

At least the cross overs of yesterday actually had an in depth story. If you compare Crisis 1-12 and Forever Evil 1-7 you will notice a big difference in how much actually occurs within the cross over. I miss the old days when writers wrote pages and pages of dialog and artists drew more than 3 panels per page. If Crisis was published today it would have been a 52 part series instead of 12