Worst Crossover of 2007
Fin Fang Doom says: Countdown!
Two years ago, the Countdown to Infinite Crisis was exciting and well-paced, its tie-ins were actually relevant, and it really set the stage for Infinite Crisis to pay it all off in a big way. Countdown to Final Crisis has been slow and cumbersome, the tie-ins have mostly just been an easy way to cash in, and there still doesn’t seem to be a cohesive narrative. We should all be very worried about how Final Crisis is going to turn out.
Doom DeLuise says: The Lightning Saga!
Never once during the course of this convoluted, shoddy, over dramatic, hackneyed piece of clap-trap did I even come close to thinking in my head, “Oh, this is neat.” It brought the return of Wally West, and it meant nothing to me by the time that happened. How Not to Tell a Story Rule Number Thirty-Five: Don’t tell a story involving 50 characters who all get equal face time without having a main character or overall narrative for the reader to latch onto. Seriously. Fifty freakin’ main characters.
Jim Doom says: Countdown!
Whether it was the title series, the way in which it would invade books I normally bought, or the countless spinoff titles, nothing has come remotely close to epitomizing the self-defeating excess of the 1990s quite like Countdown. Considering how un-fun this series is, and how completely it killed off the buzz coming off the end of 52, I can only conclude that this series is some kind of self-replicating virus, spreading across the weekly comics stands in order to kill off everything I would normally buy.
As I wrote after reading issue #39, “At this pace, the books keep getting progressively stupider and more poorly-drawn, so I’m predicting that issue #0 will be some crayon drawings of what I can only assume are potatoes or rocks bumping into each other.”
Doominator says: Countdown!
I didn’t have to read Countdown to know it sucked. All I had to read was Doom DeLuise’s rundown. It was enough to set sail to “not buying it” land. Anything I read of it turned me off immediately.
Hey! Check out what we had to say about this category in 2006 and 2005!
Haha! I threw off the unanimous decision, even though I probably hate Countdown more than all three of you combined!
That just goes to show how much I loathed the Lightning Saga! I am yelling!
What a manic-depressive year for DC in the crossover department. They either did it up really well (Sinestro Corps) or utterly dropped the ball (everything mentioned above).
I agree with you gents, but I would throw in a silver medal for World War Hulk. The series itself had four decent issues, but the sheer awfulness of the final issue and the stupid crossover material (see: Ghost Rider, WWH X-Men) was more than enough to spoil the stew. Also, it led to that retarded new Hulk series.
I wouldn’t even say that WWH had four decent issues. I’d say it sucked, through and through, from shitty start to shitty finish.
No way man, I really liked it early on. I remember saying that I even liked John Romita Jr.’s art! Some of that surely was due to the fact that I had low expectations for the series, but it wasn’t until issue 5 that I thought it became stupid. And stupid it did become.
What was nice about much of the WWH crossovers was that they were in external series (like the X-Men crossover). I think internal crossovers were the exception and not the norm. While doing that can make a good crossover seem irrelevant, it sure helps avoid a bad one.
I agree on the internal/external crossover bidness, but the point I was mainly making was that those crossover issues were laden with suck.
Personally, I thought that the JSA issues of The Lightning Saga were if nothing else READABLE, which in a way made the JLA issues that much worse.
-M