One of the joys of a giant comic collection is tracing storylines from start to finish. Tracking down every issue renders you immune to annoying gaps, crossover events, or those annoying asterisks which say “*See another issue you don’t own to find out what’s actually going on!” DC’s multiversal story was the work of decades, but a little bit intimidating for new readers, so they scrapped it to attract fresh readers with a streamlined New 52. A “streamlined” story whose first crossover event, Trinity War,  involves at least three parallel universes, and collection of clones and evil opposites with more history than Europe’s borders. It might be that DC don’t actually know what “new readers” even are anymore.

What’s worse, the crossover of the Trinity War was ended by another crossover. An entire event building up to one titanic battle, the clash of the Justice Leagues with the evil arrayed inside Pandora’s Box, and it ends just before the actual fight, saying “see you in Forever Evil!”

Then Forever Evil #1 skipped to straight after that! The new story is the aftermath of the battle we’ve never seen, the incredibly annoying intrigue of wondering what happened when even the characters we’re reading about already know. Milking an entire crossover out of a battle is bad – stretching it to two is desperation. The whole point of comics is seeing awesome things happen, not skipping around them. When you’re holding what we want to see hostage, you’re not writing the story, you’re the villain.

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