This story arc is going to change everything in comics...Please. Save Me From These Lies

I am sure anyone that likes comics is aware of something like this being said 'We have come to crisis point, nothing will be the same again'. Am I the only one who is absolutely sick of this?

Now, by this, I do not mean that I am necessarily sick of the use of a over arching crisis storyline. No, in fact I think (although there are too many of them), if they are done properly they work really well and can be very exciting for the reader. What I am complaining about is the lie that things will never be the same again and in my opinion, Marvel is more guilty of this then anyone else at the moment as it seems to use the crisis storyline just to pass the buck of power to another character for that year.

Lets go back a couple of years to the Civil War and analyse that. Before the Civil War, we were promised that things would never be the same again and straight afterwords it seemed as if this may have been the case. Spider-man had revealed his secret identity, Captain America was dead, Iron Man was in control of SHIELD, to name a few. Things actually seemed as if they had been shaken up. However, what happens a couple of months later: Spidey conveniently with the rest of the world forgets that he had told everyone that he and Peter Parker were synomous. I suppose you'll argue though at least the rest of the changes are still there so although it now seems a bit of a lie that things would never be the same (well at least for the Spiderman character), Marvel had kept their side of the bargaining right.

Wrong! Last year, we get the birth of Dark Reign with yet again the promise that things would never be the same again. I am not going to tell you the details about Secret Invasion but low and behold somehow Norman Osbourn was now the most powerful man in the Marvel universe and Tony Stark was on the run. Hang on...wait a minute, I thought that after the last 'huge' event with cival war things would never be the same again. Yet, two of the big changes were lost in less than two years after they occured and replaced with yet another 'huge' event to take its place.

Well, my learned reader at this point might argue that Cap is still dead so the civil war's impact is still there to some extent. WRONG! Cap is back with a new book Rebirth. So to me, this would seem that anything that the Civil War was meant to have 'shaken' up has been shook up and the juice has come out of the blender because it is now as if Civil War never existed.

Now, to be fair to Secret Invasion, I do think that it has sent the Marvel universe down a much darker path and has led to many new titles being produced. However, what have Marvel just annouced, what has just started? Do I even have to say it? Yep, another massive crisis has occured called The List and guess what the tag line has been 'that the Marvel Universe will never be the same again in 2010'. I might sound skeptical, but I'll believe it when I see it. The Likelihood is that Norm will be replaced by someone else till this time next year where we have to go through it all over again.

Unfortuantely for the Ultimate Universe, the infection spread to it this year with Ultimatum. Again, things will never be the same and we have seen huge deaths and changes with two new books coming out: Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Spiderman (rebooted), whilst the rest of the Ultimate line seems to have died. If these chages stick, they will have been huge changes that will have changed the Ultimate world forever but do we really believe that that will be the case. Now that it has started, more will come, I am assure of that.

In my opinion, the crisis idea is great but works best sparingly. Give it a good five years or so between each crisis. Let us readers get embedded into the lives of our favourite made up stars and then from there we will all be more shocked when something like this happens. Also it will actually let us see the characters live in a 'real' world for sometime. Unlike at the moment where they just seem to go from one crisis to another.

Now to me, however entertaining they are (and some are really good: I thought House of M in particular was awesome), we all know why both Marvel and DC do it: they make a huge amount of money. WE as the little brainless pets of the big two are, will go and buy them whatever happens and for some reason although we know that the changes will last only for about a year, we are all giddy with the thought that things will never be the same again. I am not saying I am innocent of this: i have The List on order and will be reading it, so you can argue I am a hipocrit for that reason. And when you think about it, if you were the editor of DC or Marvel wouldnt you do a crisis every year if they sell well especially in this climate? Of course you would. I just wish we didnt have to swallow the lies that things will change forever. You dont need to put that at the bottom to sell it to the comic book fans out there.