The Worst Marvel Crossover of the '90s

Last year, I finished reading The Complete Ben Reilly Epic, Book 6, which meant I had read, from beginning to end, all three of the Unholy Trinity of Bad Marvel ‘90s Crossovers:

• The Clone Saga
• Onslaught
• The Crossing

All three are terrible, terrible stories, produced at about the same time: around 1995 and 1996. That is, all three were churned out after the speculator boom of the early ‘90s and just as Marvel was heading into bankruptcy. (In fact, the Clone Saga ended with issues cover dated December 1996, the month Marvel filed for Chapter 11 protection.)

All three of these crossovers are terrible. Whether they were commercially driven abominations or horrendously misguided attempts to overhaul a line, or both, each had confused storylines and a deleterious effect on a line.

Which, though, was the worst? This is a question that people will argue about; I have a feeling most fans’ answers would depend on which abused character they like the most. Still, I think some characters received a considerably shorter end of the stick than the others. (The Fantastic Four avoided the worst of this, although it should be noted that Atlantis Rising won’t be confused for Shakespeare any time soon.)

Onslaught

Onslaught is the least offensive of these mega-crossovers. For those of you who don’t know, Onslaught was a psionic entity created in Professor Xavier’s mind after he wiped Magneto’s mind. After ominous foreshadowing and the resolution of the long-dangling X-Traitor plot, Onslaught burst forth, took over New York with the help of Sentinels, and … didn’t do much. There was muttering of conquest, but it didn’t go anywhere.

Length: Relatively short. The actual crossover itself is contained in four trade paperbacks, and one of those doesn’t even have any X-Men titles in it. However, if you throw in the lead-up to the actual crossover, you have to include another three trades. The lead up and crossover ate up about fifteen months; the crossover itself blew over in a summer.

Spillover: The actual crossover (and some of its foreshadowing) pulled in quite a few titles, including the Clone Saga (see below). Incredible Hulk, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Thor all got caught up in the crossover, which is a shame, given that all those series (except Hulk ended when Onslaught did.

Creepy dude moment: When Jean Grey explored Professor Xavier’s thoughts in X-Men #53 and discovered a repressed memory (a flashback to Uncanny X-Men #3) that Xavier had a crush on Jean from the beginning. Not standing so close to him isn’t going to help when he can telepathically crush on her wherever she is.

Damage: To the X-characters, not much. Professor Xavier was shuffled off the page — you know, because of his crimes against humanity and whatnot. The character itself wasn’t damaged too much as what Onslaught did can be considered separate from Xavier. Mutants were hated even more, although that’s par for the course.

The rest of the Marvel Universe was remade by Onslaught (at least for a year). The Avengers and its subsidiary titles were all canceled, as was Fantastic Four; Mark Waid and Ron Garney’s well-received Captain America run was axed in favor of a commercial stunt. FF, Iron Man, Avengers, and Captain America were all leased to Image creators for a year. Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios got the latter two, while Jim Lee’s Wildstorm got FF and Iron Man. The titles were rebooted, with almost 35 years of continuity being tossed out for a year. Also: Liefeld drew the weirdest Captain America.

Mitigation: Sales rose on those old titles; all of them, except perhaps Captain America, needed the added attention and sales. More importantly, Onslaught wiped out the damage The Crossing caused, and that’s almost a blessing.

The Clone Saga

Now we’re getting into the heavy hitters. In the Clone Saga — a sequel to a ‘70s story that had to be confusingly retitled The Original Clone Saga — a clone of Peter Parker returns to New York to confront Peter. The clone, who calls himself Ben Reilly, is followed by Kaine, another clone who hates Ben, and the Jackal, who created those two clones plus others … Ben and Peter argue about who’s the clone, Peter steps down as Spider-Man when he loses his powers and has a baby on the way, and then a figure from the past comes to take credit for everything that’s happened in Peter’s life.

Length: Interminable. The crossover ate up two years of the four Spider-titles plus ancillary titles like Spider-Man Unlimited and Spider-Man Team-Up. More than 100 issues were thrown at this story! The creators backtracked, laid false trails, changed their minds (OK, so it was mostly editors and the business people who changed their minds), and generally squandered months and months of Spider-Man stories. The fruit of their labors filled eleven trade paperbacks.

It’s hard to get across how much ink and paper was wasted on the Clone Saga. Spider-Man has always been a character who can support the one-issue story, but combined with many throwaway stories were the idiocy of the Jackal and Spidercide, Gaunt and Seward Trainer, Scrier and Judas Traveler and hosts of other villains who had no purpose other than to look mysterious and prevent any resolution to the story.

And when they went to wrap it up, all it took was a four-issue story. Just one month! Why couldn’t they have done that a year earlier?

Spillover: Relatively little. Spider-Man’s troubles didn’t affect other titles much. The clone, going by the alias of Scarlet Spider, kinda joined the New Warriors, and he appeared as Spider-Man in an issue of Daredevil. The Clone Saga also brushed up against the status quos of Punisher, Green Goblin, and Venom, but no one cared about the Phil Urich Green Goblin at the time, and the Punisher and Venom series are both best forgotten. I mean, the Punisher had a ponytail, and no one wants to acknowledge that.

Really, despite the crossover allegedly being so popular, no one else wanted to touch it.

Creepy dude moment: When Peter smacked his wife. It was portrayed as an accident, Peter lashing out randomly after learning he was a clone, but it happened. One moment of frustration and insanity labeled Ant-Man a wifebeater forever, but the same standard wasn’t applied to Peter hitting Mary Jane. This is for two reasons: a) The storyline in which Ant-Man hit the Wasp was good and not best forgotten, like the Clone Saga, and b) People actually like Spider-Man.

Later, Peter tried to kill Mary Jane, but he was being mind controlled, which is understandable and normal behavior for superheroes.

Damage: After two years, the creators realized how badly the entire idea was, and they tried to put everything back where it was while providing a satisfying conclusion. What they did satisfied few, except in the sense that it allowed everyone to put the clone nonsense behind them and forget about it.

The Clone Saga, in its blind grasping for sense and sensation, committed several sins that should be unforgivable. It brought Norman Osborn back from the dead as the architect of the Clone Saga. It killed Ben despite his potential because he was a loose end and a reminder of the Clone Saga’s sins. It caused Mary Jane and Peter’s daughter to be stillborn, then held out hope that the child was merely kidnapped. It made Peter do bad things to Mary Jane.

It made Peter Parker into a clone for a while, which was stupid. It told us, “Everything you know is wrong.” Everything we knew was published by Marvel Comics, which should have been a tipoff that Marvel’s output was not the most reliable source.

Mitigation: The crossover had many ideas that were worth exploring. Peter having a child and moving on isn’t a bad idea, but there’s no reason he had to be labeled the clone for the idea to work. Kaine wasn’t interesting at the time, but he has been used well in the last few years. Getting rid of Aunt May was long overdue; it allowed Peter to grow some. I even have some sympathy for using Kaine to get rid of some of Spider-Man’s older adversaries, although the new Doctor Octopus didn’t pan out.

Most impressive is Ben Reilly. Seeing a different Peter, one who had been lost for years and coming back to a different Peter who had grown but had also gotten a bit lost, presented the reader with an interesting contrast. (Ben wouldn’t have cut a deal to allow for uneasy coexistence with Venom, but he also might not have given Sandman a chance to reform.) Ben’s existence was wasted, of course — except in the M2 Universe, which picked up on some of these threads in Spider-Girl.

Avengers: The Crossing

Iron Man kills a few women to hide a secret: he’s been working with Kang for years to help Kang, Mantis, and their Chrononauts invade Earth and conquer it using his time-travel powers. Kang does manage to erase Vietnam from almost everyone’s memories, but that’s about as far as his conquest goes.

Length: A little longer than the core Onslaught crossover but much shorter than Onslaught’s foreshadowing. The Crossing took place over half a year, and its contents — a mere 25 issues — were reprinted in a single oversized omnibus. (You can pick up the omnibus for about $30 on Amazon, although two insane people gave the book three-star reviews. Three stars! Why not give the book a whole constellation?)

Spillover: None, as far as I can see. The number of titles involved was admirably restrained: only Avengers, Force Works (formerly Avengers West Coast), Iron Man, and War Machine were involved in the story. Thor and Captain America stayed the hell away from The Crossing, which shows excellent sense.

Creepy dude moment: Everything Iron Man does in this book. In addition to killing three unarmed women (and no men), he blasts Wasp so hard the measures taken to save her life turn her into a wasp-human hybrid. (She seemed fine with that, though.) He kidnaps a couple of other women close to him. I suppose you could make a case that this is the flipside to the charmingly predatory nature of Tony’s normal persona — he uses and seduces women — but this turn has the subtlety of an atom bomb lobbed through a store window.

Damage: Holy God, did this do a number on Iron Man. Iron Man had been corrupted by Kang and was working for him for pretty much the entire Marvel Age of Heroes, although the story gives him no motivation to do so. To protect his secret, Tony declared war on women. And this is the guy upon the Marvel Cinematic Universe was built about a decade later!

Because a series starring a traitorous murderer would have been a problem, Marvel killed off old Tony and replaced him with a teenage version from a different timeline. Teen Tony couldn’t be too different, though, so the fight that introduces him to the main Marvel Universe ends with him suffering heart damage.

The art is inconsistent and usually awful. Instead of giving the secondary titles a sales boost, The Crossing failed War Machine and Force Works so thoroughly they were cancelled two months later. Obscure, best-forgotten continuity is crucial to the story, and readers are expected to remember things like who Yellowjacket II and Gilgamesh are. The story has tons of forgotten and unimportant characters wandering through it; sometimes we’re even supposed to care about them. (The death of Gilgamesh is supposed to be momentous, and the story can’t get that across.) Mantis wanting revenge on the Avengers makes no sense, and Kurt Busiek retconned her (and most of Kang’s soldiers) into Space Phantoms in Avengers Forever. Adult versions of Luna (Quicksilver and Crystal’s daughter) and the Vision and Scarlet Witch’s kids run rampant throughout the story, working for Kang, and no one can figure out who they are. War Machine has a horrifically ugly suit of armor. (I wonder what happened to it …?)

Mitigation: Onslaught / Heroes Reborn and Avengers Forever cleaned up so much of the mess from this crossover that we don’t have to remember it any more. Otherwise, this book had no redeeming features.

Verdict

The Crossing is the worst of these; it’s so bad, the omnibus should be marked as hazardous waste. Still, it doesn’t have much of an effect on modern Marvel continuity. The Clone Saga gave us the returned Green Goblin and Kaine; Onslaught briefly ended decades of continuity in tangentially related titles and really launched the “Professor Xavier is a monster” idea into the wild. Again: The Crossing was published in 1995. Iron Man came out in 2008. In 13 years, the worst storyline in Marvel history was wiped from the timeline as thoroughly as Kang wanted to wipe out the resistance to him.

X-Men: Onslaught: The Complete Epic, v. 3

Collects: X-Men #55, Uncanny X-Men #336, Cable #35, X-Force #58, X-Man #19, Incredible Hulk #445, Iron Man #332, Avengers #402, Thor #502, Wolverine #105 (1996)

Released: August 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 248 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785128250

What is this?: The penultimate volume of the Onslaught story, a “Mutants Gone Wild” cautionary tale.

The culprits: Too many to name, not enough to blame

Completism is a hell of a drug.

It’s one nearly every comic-book fan has felt the pull of. There are steps, gradations, but they’re all rationalizations and symptoms that don’t lead to an understanding of why completism has such a firm hold on our souls. It’s common to all sorts of collecting, and when you cross collecting with serial literature … well, like I said: a hell of a drug, although not without its highs.

We live in a Golden Age for completists, a time when we can go out and buy trade paperbacks of storylines that would be too Godawful or tedious to collect issue by issue but are relatively painless to swallow in one gulp — as long as we hold our noses. For us Gen Xers, it’s truly wonderful, with Marvel releasing compilations of ‘90s stories that seemed too horrible to contemplate at the beginning of the decade; the House of Ideas has released the hell out of the Clone Saga and has kept the Onslaught “Saga” in print, so all that remains is for someone at Marvel to find the unmitigated gall (or suffer the crushing brain damage) to complete the trifecta of crap by releasing a collection of The Crossing.

*ahem* Anyway. X-Men: Onslaught: The Complete Epic, Book 3, is indisputably part of the Onslaught crossover, which is indisputably an X-Men story. Well, you could dispute that, since it did end v. 1 of Fantastic Four, Avengers, Thor, and Iron Man (the last issues of the latter three are collected here), but the number of ancillary X-titles is convincing. What is disputable is whether anyone should buy it.

Despite the reputation of the Onslaught crossover, I’m not saying this book is bad. No, far from it; there’s nothing of the offensive stench of, say, Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Classic, v. 1, or Captain America & the Falcon, v. 1: Two Americas. The skill involved in the individual issues is even better than Gambit Classic, although admittedly that’s setting the bar low.

Still, I’d advise reading any of those books before Onslaught, v. 3. Why? Because they are interesting in their awfulness. Nothing happens in the 248 pages of Onslaught, v. 3. Well, nothing happens except Onslaught loses Professor X as a prisoner and gains X-Man, which is more of a rearrangement of Scrabble tiles than a plot development. Oh, and Teen Tony Iron Man makes very ‘90s headpieces out of vibranium. But that’s really it, unless you like crowd control, attacks that achieve nothing but also lose nothing, illusory telepathic landscapes, and mutant mutant angst angst. And I suppose if you like catchphrases, Onslaught screams, “Behold my mighty hand!” several times, but as a catchphrase that ranks just below “Around the survivors a perimeter create.”

The blame for this doughnut hole of a collection has to be placed on the editors — four different editors, according to the title page: Mark Gruenwald (Iron Man and Avengers), Bobbie Chase (Hulk and Thor), Mark Powers (Cable), and Jaye Gardner (X-Man). Interestingly, Bob Harras — Marvel’s editor in chief and chief X-titles editor at the time — is listed in the credits of the remaining titles’ individual issues, but he isn’t credited on the title page. Which is a shame, because the buck has to stop with him, as both a book editor and editor in chief … I mean, who else can you blame for this an entire collection devoted to marking time, waiting for something or other — Iron Man and his party hats, I guess.

But much as I’m loathe to do it, maybe Gruenwald has to share some of the blame. While he has Terry Kavanagh and Joe Bennett actually contributing to the plot in Iron Man, Mark Waid and Mike Deodato are filling space in Avengers #402 — the last issue of Avengers, v. 1 — with a pointless fight. It’s bad enough the Avengers are going to bite it in an X-Men one-shot (fifteen-year-old spoilers!), but there’s nothing here that hints at the momentousness of the plot or the title’s history. This was when renumbering meant something! Marvel was licensing the Avenger titles to non-Marvel creators! There had to be a better way for the title to go out.

To be fair, Bill Messner-Loebs and Deodato do better with Thor. It’s cute they think there’s a purpose to continuing their subplots, like the Enchantress’s amnesia and captivity and Odin’s loss of his divinity and mind, and insisting Red Norvell is important. But there’s a sense of the title’s history included in the final issue. Thor runs into Jane Foster, Don Blake’s first love, and he remembers his history and an early adventure with his foster brother; the frogs from Thor’s days as the Frog of Thunder stop by. Messner-Loebs even has Hela, in a truly ridiculous Asgardian outfit, offer to make Thor her king if he wishes to avoid his death the following day. It gives the issue import and a sense of doom as it rolls into the inevitable, and I appreciate that. I think it could have been done better, by laying on the prophecy and references to Ragnarok, but the effort is there, and it’s more than we see in the other two dying Avengers titles.

I’m not going to single out any other individual writing or art, except to say that I have always disliked Angel Medina’s overly cartoony and grotesque work on Hulk There’s just too little to say about these issues; they fit together, I can see the skill there, but they’re not saying anything. Instead, I’m going to make two points that probably would be better in a footnote:

• First, it would be a rarity to see all those high issue numbers in a trade paperback collecting comics from the last decade. Sure, Marvel’s big on reinstalling the old numbering, but Marvel switches to new #1s so often it’s uncommon to have many comics with their original numbering at the same time.
  
• Secondly, there is some confusion on the Internet as to what is collected in Onslaught, v. 3. The Amazon listing includes Punisher (v. God knows what) #11, (Peter Parker:) Spider-Man #72, Fantastic Four #416, and Green Goblin #12; it leaves out the issues of X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Cable, X-Force, and Thor. Even the impressive Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators has it wrong; it makes the same mistake as the Amazon listing plus it adds Amazing Spider-Man #415.

In any event: This is one boring book. The plot goes nowhere. Art from Joe Madureira, Andy Kubert, and Deodato is not going to change that at all. I think you’d be better off jumping from the awful Onslaught, v. 1, to v. 4. You’re not going to miss anything important. But that’s not why people buy this book — they buy it because the drug that is completism has them in its claws.

In this case, though, completism is very much like a sleeping pill.

Rating: Zzz … (You can read that as either I was too bored by this book to rate it or that I graded it Triple-Z. Either one is fine by me.)

X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic, Book 1

Collects: X-Men #53-4, Uncanny X-Men #334-5, Fantastic Four #415, Avengers #401, Onslaught: X-Men, Cable #34, and Incredible Hulk #444 (1996)

Released: February 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 256 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785128236

What is this?: Behold my mighty hand! Onslaught’s true name is revealed, and he begins his slow, ponderous march across the Marvel Universe.

The culprits: Too many to name or punish.

I remember the Onslaught “Epic”; although I did not behold his mighty hand first hand until years later, I watched the story unfold from the safety of Usenet in 1996. There was some excitement at the time, since the identity of the X-Traitor would finally be revealed and a big summer crossover would sprawl before the reading public. I don’t know that anyone was expecting it to be any good, though.

That was fortunate, since the crossover was widely panned at the time. But how does it stack up more than a decade later?

About as badly as you might expect. Wisely, the setup for the Onslaught storyline is omitted in X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic, Book 1. It was too large and too confusing; the writers admitted they changed the direction of the storyline and at times were working blind. But it’s helpfully referenced in footnotes (when you can read the footnotes, which are often the same color as the text-box background).

The plot has the X-Men discovering the identity of the ultra-powerful psychic entity Onslaught, who happens to be one of their own; once he’s flushed out, Onslaught starts gathering his power by collecting Franklin Richards and brainwashing the Hulk. There’s unrealized menace and handwringing and angst and oh God text balloons everywhere. You might expect better from writer Mark Waid; keep right on expecting, because you’re not going to find it here. Waid wasn’t happy with the direction of the X-books or the freedom he was given; that probably explains the wretched pile of X-cess he and fellow writer Scott Lobdell handed in to editor Bob Harras — or maybe Harras ordered them to give him that. I don’t know.

Here’s what happens over 250+ pages and eight issues (plus a larger special issue):

• Buildup to the revelation (Onslaught taunts Jean, Juggernaut punchy-punchies his way into the Mansion) (X-Men #53-4 and Uncanny #334)
• Revelation — which was completely obvious by this time — plus fight (Onslaught: X-Men)
• Yak with the Avengers, during which nothing happens (Uncanny #335)
• Cable and a mind-controlled Hulk punch each other (Cable #34 and Incredible Hulk #444)
• Joseph (who was thought to be Magneto) introduced to the plot, for non-obvious reasons (Avengers #401)
• Onslaught kidnaps Franklin Richards (Fantastic Four #414)

The pacing is appalling. Interestingly, the ancillary titles actually have a decent pace — well, all right, two issues for a Cable / Hulk fight is excessive, but I’ll blame that on Cable. None of them stand out as particularly good examples of the comic book arts; even Hulk, written by Peter David, is sapped of all its individuality by the crossover. They’re either padded or unremarkable large-scale fight scenes.

The art is all over the place, but fortunately, since it’s the X-titles of the mid-‘90s, Marvel had a lot of their best working on this crossover. The two X-Men issues feature the flashy if a bit underdeveloped early Andy Kubert, while the Uncanny pencils are from the manga-influenced Joe Madureira. These work together about as well as you might expect. Kubert and Dan Green get the important X-Men: Onslaught issue; Green’s work resembled John Romita Jr. at the time, and Green had been an X-Men artist earlier in the decade. Interestingly, there are parts that look like the work of neither, but whyever that is, I’m sure the orange milk isn’t either’s fault.

But with the crossover issues, you have the early Mike Deodato on Avengers, which I didn’t care for, and Carlos Pacheco’s early American work on Fantastic Four. Then to end it you have the pretty-but-stiff Ian Churchill on Cable and the hideously unattractive work of Angel Medina on Incredible Hulk. (Those last two are one hell of a whiplash, I can tell you, since they are linked and back to back in the collection.) It’s a real mishmash with the ancillary issues added in. There’s nothing that can be done about it now, and it doesn’t detract from the readability (except for Medina’s work), but it’s a real range of styles.

The back cover and indicia claim Book 1 contains Fantastic Four #414 and Avengers #400; it doesn’t. There’s only a page from each of these comics in this book, and it’s deceptive to claim otherwise. (It’s the same practice that allows retailers to claim X-Men Visionaries: Jim Lee TPB has Uncanny X-Men #252, 254, 260-1, 264, 280, and 286 when in fact the book contains only the covers from those issues.) On the other hand, it’s better information than you can get on the Internet. The usually reliable (and invaluable) Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators claims X-Force #57 and X-Man #18 are included as well; they are not. Marvel.com makes the same claim, as does Amazon. In fact, wherever you look on the Internet, the listed contents of the four volumes in the series are contradictory or overlapping. (If anyone knows the true contents of these volumes, leave them in the comments.)

Much as you’d expect, the Onslaught crossover is best experienced through Wikipedia. Read X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic, Book 1, at your own risk.

Rating: (1 of 5)