Why Blending Cross Over Events Is Not A Good Idea
When I used to write novellas more, rather than having a crap load of subplots, I would more commonly have a bunch of self-contained lengthy short stories about one of the main characters in the cast. They might have a subplot here in there within any specific self-contained story arc, but the overall arc was closer to a collection of short stories that shared the same cast, with a different focus character. And then tie all the story arcs together with a giant cross-over events, as they call it in comics, where they must combine their skills to overcome some great odd.
I think this is part of why I always found writing subplots to be kind of strange. So today I found out that apparently in the comics world, more specifically Marvel, it had been a fairly common practice to abstain from subplots. Which makes me wonder if I may have gotten my skittishness for writing subplots partially from being used to reading comics. Although usually manga is structured slightly differently, and there usually tends to be more subplots, despite each chapter being somewhat self-contained.
I have my own anti-villain universe, although they’re not really villains in the same sense that one would determine someone is a villain in a superhero genre context. So my cross-over events in my own novellas would only really work within the continuity of my own short fiction. I suspect this is why I tend to not like cross-over events: at least in my case, it would be a little bit like having two cross-over events run at the same time, and having to keep trying of which universe the main character came from.
In general, this is why I think forcing creators to do cross-over events with licensed properties is not really a great idea. But it’s an even worse idea when you’re trying to cross-over two creator-owned properties. Although thankfully in the novel writing world, the whole licensed content vs. creator-owned isn’t as much of a thing, as well as cross-over events being generally less likely to happen.
But generally publishers should respect the visions of each individual creator, and not try to cross-contaminate people’s universes, especially when you’re dealing with creator owned content where each universe has its own self-contained lore. In mine universe in particular, there are events that happened to what was once the United States, that could not happen in other people’s universe, unless we owned our own characters, but we each wrote into the same universe.
Which means if I ever created a literary magazine that also published comics, either I would need to go the route of licensing universes around a specific theme, or I would need to have a vastly different kind of vision, as at least to me, crossing over two different universes has never ended well in fiction, and especially comics where it is more common.