I love my comic books, and I love my comic book store (shameless plug for my guys), but unemployment is a harsh mistress, so during the thin months I’ve been only an occasional visitor, buying an inch off my shelf and begging the guys to keep stashing my stuff in the back until better times.

Better times having arrived, I scraped together some money, bought out my shelf, and painstakingly compiled all the interim inches with the new bounty. I am overwhelmed. Seldom have I seen such wealth of intoxicating continuity, untouched and unseen, and I am carefully easing into the binge so I enjoy and absorb to my utmost. Last night, I gobbled Batman: War Games, a huuuuuuge crossover event spanning just about every Gotham and Gotham-Jr. title (after all, I buy them all already!), which was just getting juicy (Batman’s existence proved by news footage! Will Tim become Robin again?) when I dropped out of regular consumption. So, while stirring my supper, while brushing my teeth, and while I should have been sleeping, I finished out the tale.

Of course, I had heard the rumors, and had them confirmed in my occasional visits to Comic Book land…they killed off my Spoiler, my dear little Spoiler, my “Dear Diary, maybe vigilantes need to pay attention in Physics class.” Spoiler, the only girl I ever approved of for Tim, the first canon female Robin. It was inevitable, once they made her karmically responsible for the entire War Games fiasco. It was inevitable, when she became Tim’s girlfriend. It was inevitable the moment she put on the R. sniff

May I digress to say that I have never seen such a WEIRD torture sequence in comic books? He’s going to torture Spoiler with a POWER DRILL and when we cut back to your torture already in progress she has…a bloody nose and some scrapes. He’s going to torture her with what looks like a BONE SAW and we cut back to Spoiler with…a bloody nose and some scrapes. Umm. You keep scaring me and reassuring me. I don’t know what’s going on. Are you bastards enough to torture my dear Steph, or are you going to claim you are and then wuss out? Not that I want you to torture Spoiler, but make up your minds, I’m getting dread-whiplash! Never mind the fact that this is the Black Mask, the guy who plucked out a man’s eyeballs and fed them to his wife, in-frame. You’re squandering all my accumulated fear of this guy.

AHEM. Okay, I’m back. God I babble on this subject. ANYWAYS, they not only Kirk-girlfriended my beloved Spoiler, they killed Orpheus. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no real attachment to Orpheus, and don’t know much about him…except that he was the only friggin’ black hero in Gotham, and one of maybe four black male heroes in the entire DCU. So they killed the girlfriend, and they killed the black guy. Oh wait, it CAN get more stereotypical—the black guy died first!

At any rate, the point of this blogget, back when it had one, before the endless background story and angry digressions, was that Batman: War Games was a friggin’ massacre. They not only killed off two good guys, they killed approximately 17 mob bosses, 20 established henches, and various and sundry other minor villains. Most of those within the first two issues. We’re talkin’ 432 pages of full-color abattoir. And that’s when it occurred to me that there are a few basic types of crossover event. Each event can belong to more than one category, but these are the raison-d’êtres:

1. Buy more titles: The underlying purpose of any crossover is to get you to buy more books, hoping that the fan who buys every Gotham book BUT Bats’s four will buy in ‘just for this storyline’ and [Not that this has ever happened to me!|text|stay hooked]. But some are basically just an excuse for the writers to have fun mixing characters up and boost cross-readership. Anything of the form Blahman/Captain Whats-her-toes is assuredly of this category.
2. House Cleaning: When a comic book company promises “NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!” what they really mean is, “Dear god, we have cluttered up this place.” On a small scale, what you get is War Games; huge numbers of mob bosses, henchmen and hitmen created for one-offs or color in the various Batbooks are lined up and shot for the good of the poor overworked continuity editor. On a large scale, you get Crisis on Infinite Earths, the gigantic reset event that attempted to create continuity in the DC Universe in the first place. The whole point is to make the crazy spiderweb mythology hang together for just a few years more. And along the way they make a few other changes, just to make you feel progress is underway (blowing up Oracle’s headquarters, for instance.)
   
3. Dixie Cup Elseworld: This kind is my FAVORITE. Rather than put out a wacky concept as an Elseworld book and try to get people to notice it by squandering advertising space, you just build the thing into ongoing books and press ‘reset’ at the end. Some are pretty explicitly like this; the fantabulously silly Sins of Youth crossover, which converted just about every hero in the DCU and most of the villains to children and hormonal teenagers, while shunting the teen heroes into sudden maturity, was pretty obvious. Some are less so. Batman: No Man’s Land was completely part of Batman continuity, involved no magic, super science, or interfering witch-boys from another dimension; they just wanted to do Post-Apocalyptic Batman, so they knocked Gotham down, played around in the rubble for months, and then built it again, put up a statue, and ruminated on all they’d learned.
   

So there you have it, my first crack at a unified theory of comic book crossovers. Why do you care? I don’t know. What does it mean? That I’m a big big geek and DC Comics gets all my money.