Crossovers

I think crossovers are strongly associated in a lot of people's minds with profit-driven gimmickry. James Hunt from Den of Geek puts it this way:

In comics, event-driven crossovers have a bad reputation. It’s understandable. Where, in the 70s and early 80s they were a good excuse to tell a slightly-more epic than usual story, over 2 or 3 titles, they quickly mutated into the unwieldy, line-spanning beasts we see before us today. Not a huge surprise - crossovers drive sales, and men in suits love money.

This bad reputation is hardly confined to superhero comics, either--this review characterizes horror crossover movie Freddy vs. Jason, pictured above, as "more marketing gimmick than film."

Despite this view, the vast majority of crossovers are pretty much the opposite of "marketing gimmicks" cooked up or mandated by "men in suits [who] love money."  I'm referring here to fanfics.  TV-Tropes calls crossovers "one of the two or three biggest reasons to create them."  How many fan-written crossover stories do you suppose there are on the internets?  I'd guess bazillion sounds about right.  These aren't conceived or written for any commercial reasons, but because fans want to see certain character combinations so badly that they're driven to write the stories themselves for the sheer purpose of experiencing them.

Given this mind-boggling volume of crossovers written on an amateur basis--literally, for the love of it--why are crossovers so strongly associated with the mandates of executives who are indifferent to art and driven by greed?  It all boils down to the realities of intellectual property and the ways those realities shape attitudes and perceptions.  As much as fans might love to write their own fan works, they also tend to hold strong and fastidious views of canonicity.  For any given series, franchise, property, or whatever, works that are in-continuity and regarded as canon--which is to say, the works that really matter--are those which are authorized by whoever holds the rights (actually, they're a subset of authorized works, since stuff that's not canonical can be authorized, like Marvel's What If? and DC's Elseworlds, but not the other way around).

And who holds those rights, which are the keys to any canon?  Corporate ownership is pretty much the order of the day, at least as far as characters from film, tv, and most comics are concerned.  When we talk about creator-owned properties, we're pretty much only talking about characters introduced in novels and independent comics.  But even when individual creators own their characters, they only own the characters they've created.  Media conglomerates may control the rights to vast shared universes and extensive stables of characters from multiple continuities, and so are in a much better position to stage crossovers.  Crossovers that are officially produced, distributed, and marketed through mainstream commercial channels are inevitably also vastly higher-profile than fan works, which can have none of those advantages.

For these reasons, the crossovers that stand out and matter most to us are almost always corporate products with some degree of executive involvement.  And there are plenty of tales out of school to confirm our worst suspicions about that involvement.  Here, for example, are Joe Quesada and Bob Layton dishing about the execrable, deservedly-infamous Image/Valiant crossover, Deathmate:

On the company’s next crossover Quesada states, “Now the Deathmate crossover with Image was just a stunt, so it wasn't one of those things that I was hyper excited about. I still forget I did that book until people bring it to me at cons to sign.” . . .

“Here’s what you don't know about that time at Valiant,” says Bob Layton. “I literally had nothing to do with most of those projects. Deathmate was thrust upon us because (Steve) Massarsky and Jim Lee were best buddies at the time and had privately arranged the crossover. The project was jammed down our throats and we did our best to comply, although most Valiant creators thought it was a bad idea."

Notoriously, according to Valerie D'Orazio, DC's Identity Crisis crossover was conceived in an editorial meeting, specifically when someone declared, "We need a rape"--their brilliant idea about how to take the company in a daring, more profitable new direction (and hey, from that perspective, it apparently worked).

Not to pick on DC, but Dan DiDio told IGN, "We're not just going to fill a bucket – as I like to say – with books just because we know people are going to buy anything with Blackest Night on it. If you do that, it hurts you for whatever you have to follow that."  Well, as the crossover proved wildly successful, DC proceeded to do exactly that. 

In sum, if there's a widespread perception that crossovers are profit-driven gimmicks, that's because so many that are canonical (and therefore most visible) give that impression, which is then confirmed by remarks from industry insiders.

Fan-written crossovers have their own problems, though--namely, the notoriously low quality of so much fan fiction.  Again, from TV-Tropes:

Sturgeon's Law is particularly obvious when the barriers to entry — the whims of publishers — are removed. Self-publishing, especially in the virtually cost-free environment of the Internet, makes the cruddy 90% visible to the public; it no longer languishes in an aspiring writer's desk drawer. This often leads to the false impression that Fan Fic attracts poor writers; the fact is that the poor writers have always been out there, but until recently, their poor writing had few outlets to the public. As one writer put it, "flipping through Fanfiction.net is like flipping through hell with an occasional slice of the heavenly cheesecake thrown in."

If we assume that the 90% figure applies only to published works, then about one in a million of all things out there is not crud. Most people, though, have seen more than one non-cruddy thing in their lifetime.

Actually, I think the two problems--the gimmickiness of officially-produced crossovers and the abysmal quality of fan-produced ones--are related, and sometimes even identical.  The core of both problems is . . . the very appeal of crossovers!  The fact that this appeal is natural, broad, significant, and genuine is what makes it possible for crossovers to be exploited as gimmicks.  But it also misleads legions of writers into thinking that a crossover--that is, the mere fact of being a crossover--delivers its own payoffs, all by itself. 

In this regard, crossovers are sort of like that other biggest reason to write fanfics--sex. 

The thing about sex is that it really is a hot-button.  Just pushing it really does work, as anyone knows who's ever gotten off to some context-free image or video clip on the internet.  Unfortunately, that misleads almost everyone into assuming that it only has to be pushed to get the desired response in the context of a story.  Talk about exploiting something for profit--"Sex sells!" makes it the proverbial gimmick.  Talk about Sturgeon's Law--I think the percentage of unreadably boring erotica would be cut in half if writers would just realize that simply writing a sex scene doesn't suffice to make it sexy.  What they don't realize is that if sex and story aren't integrated properly, one will overwhelm the other to the point of annoying irrelevance.  In more visual media like film and comics, the charge delivered by the immediacy of the images is more likely to make the story seem like pointless filler.  For this reason, hardcore porn has pretty much reached a point where even a pretence of half-assed fictional narrative isn't worth the bother, as one scriptwriter learned to his chagrin:

Eventually I asked Brandon if he had any intention of shooting my script. "We have to shoot all the sex first," he said. "Once that's out of the way, we'll get to your stuff." . . .

As midnight approached, Brandon finally called a wrap. But before the crew could pack up their cameras and run for the doors, Brandon reminded them that their day was not over. "OK, people," he shouted. "Let's do the fast forward."

His announcement was greeted with groans of protest and gnashing of teeth. A gloomy fatigue fell over the room, and the crew went about their tasks with exaggerated fatigue. One of the actresses walked onto the set, her hair in curlers, and asked me why everybody looked so upset.

"Something about a fast forward," I said.

"Oh no, really?" The actress said, frowning deeply. "Shit, I hate this part."

"What's a fast forward?" I asked.

A grip walked over, dragging his feet like a teenager on his way to detention. "Fucking hell," he said.

"I know," the actress agreed.

"It never gets any easier," the grip said.

Another actor joined the group. "Fast forward?" he said, noting their sour expressions.

"It's just not fair," the actress scowled.

"What's a fast forward?" I asked again.

"The script," the actor said, almost whispering the words.

"I don't get it," I said. "Why's it called fast forward?"

They looked at me like I had missed something obvious. And then they each held up a hand, mimicking the use of a remote control. "Fucking fast forward," the grip moaned. "Like it matters."

In text-based media--which can "show" us things, just not as directly or vividly--a poorly-integrated sex-scene reads like any other chunk of text that interrupts the story's momentum; it's as leaden as a block of purple description or an infodump.  This can happen in movies too, of course, when a gratuitous sex-scene is tossed into an otherwise strong story--it can feel like a few irksome minutes of nothing happening, with the story on hold.  Too many critics and half-clever writers then look at all this dull sex and draw the wrong conclusion: that it doesn't leave enough to the imagination, and would be more erotic if it were suggested rather than shown.  That's not the problem.  The problem is that, for the hot-button to work, it needs to be connected to the power source of characters and story, and in almost all bad cases, it just isn't, or they aren't strong enough because the writer hasn't bothered to develop them, because, you know . . . SEX!

I think that for a sex scene not to be completely skippable, it must at least change the character's narrative position.  For it to be truly interesting, I think the next minimum requirement is that it also have its own well-crafted internal plot structure.  The explicit depiction of sex in a story has tremendous potential to be sexy and to deliver amazing intensity of experience, if done right.  For example, Surrogate Wife is essentially a series of sexual encounters, but each one is a mini-story unto itself, and together they form the points that trace a definite character-arc for the heroine, and as a result, the sex not only never gets tedious, but it's some of the hottest I've ever read.  The book is also well-written in general, with an engaging narrative voice, so I'm not claiming these formal principles are guaranteed to deliver that kind of payoff; what I'm saying is that sex in a story won't deliver any kind of payoff at all if they're neglected.     

As with sex, so with crossovers, just pushing that button in a story doesn't cut it.  Crossovers really do promise an incredibly rewarding payoff, but it doesn't come automatically--creators have to make it work.  Because crossovers are ultimately about characters interacting, the possibilities for that are endless, and it's not so easy to distill principles that they can or must follow to achieve it.  One point of all this is to say, just throwing two or more favorite characters together doesn't make a story good or enjoyable--a good, enjoyable story still has to be told about them.  It has to be, but another point is that it can be.  There's no reason why it can't.  Crossovers don't fail as often as they do because of some inherent flaw.  They fail because too many creators expect the crossover trope to do the work of storytelling.  But if a crossover story is well-told, it will be all the more enjoyable for being about those favorite characters.