Focus! Focus!

I've been spending some time trying to catch up with the X-Verse lately and I think that I've begun to see one of the "problems" that is stalking it lately. The same problem also hits Superman and Batman in some ways.

The problem, simply, is focus, or more properly, lack thereof. With so many different books and teams out there, everything just gets too diffuse and confusing. What makes it worse is the fact that those books are usually dragged into self-crossovers. So, instead of there being an Uncanny story, and an X-Men story, there's a story that pulls them together. Indeed, Marvel's been doing this for years, with things like X-Cutioner's Song and X-tinction Agenda.

Even if a book gets a fairly good run, it's really hard to have great focus when you're dragged into the annual crossover kicking and screaming.

I don't necessarily think it's the number of books in and of itself, but the way that they are forced to "work together." At one time, Marvel was running Uncanny, X-Factor, New Mutants and the original Excalibur all at the same time, yet there wasn't a great deal of crossing over between them. In many ways, that worked and worked well. Each book had a focus and theme. Even when they did have crossovers like Fall of the Mutants (of course, this is slightly Pre-Excalibur), they were set up in such a way that each book was focusing on their own little angle, and didn't directly interact with the larger scheme of things until afterwards. In that way, each book had their own focus and themes, and wasn't forced to abandon those things to get dragged into this years mega-super-duper-uber-crossover. Now, INMVHO, Uncanny was the weak sister of the books in that time frame, but that's another issue for another time.

While the crossover-o-mania may not be as bad now as it was in years past with the X-books, from what I can see, they still have the problem of being all piled on top of one another. For instance, I just read the Trade book of the first 12 issues of Whedon's Astonishing X-Men (good stuff). It actually is more focused than the other books, and holds up on its own pretty well, other than out of nowhere Elixir shows up. He was necessary to the plot, but if you weren't reading New X-Men of that era, you could be pretty confused as to what he was doing.

This is only one aspect of focus, and maybe later I'll talk more about focus in terms of the world and threats they face. Or maybe not. You know I'm unreliable.