From Blackest Night to Civil War, the Heroic Age to Ultimatum, Second Coming all the way to Final Crisis–superhero comics in the 20XXs are defined as much by their earth-shaking, continuity-twisting, world-changing Big Events as anything else. But this is nothing new, and over the years plenty of events have been forgotten. For every Secret Wars, there’s a Phoenix Gambit; for every Siege there’s an Assault on Armor City… or an Extreme Sacrifice… or a War of the Gods… or–you get the idea. This is your passport to oblivion, your guide to the event necropolis: this is Crossed-Out Crossovers.
“THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?” You’re reading a comic book blog, so I’m just going to assume that you’re up on things. You’ve heard all about “event fatigue,” and read all of the laundry lists of complaints about all these meaningless, needlessly inflated events that promise huge changes and then slink off into oblivion and half-off back-issue bins. In fact, as far as comic blog topics go, “event fatigue” is probably somewhere between “Scott Pilgrim” and “Donald Glover should be Spider-Man” in terms of all-time word-count totals. Here’s the thing, though: if you have event fatigue NOW, just imagine what it was like back during the speculator days. I lived through them as a youth–I like to cast myself as Newt in Aliens, surrounded on all sides by chromium covers and crossover events. But now, I’m grown up, and it’s time to cast myself as Ripley in Aliens, going back to take care of some unfinished business.
For our first week, I take a look at that ever so famous Fantastic Four “event”, Atlantis Rising. You remember that, don’t you? Check after the cut for some thoughts on the story (and look forward for more next week)!
So now it’s time to look at that crucial question: is it the end of the world as we know it? This is the question begged of us by the back cover of Fantastic Four: Atlantis Rising #1. Not a lot of thought has ever been devoted to this event, even though solicitation copy at the time promised an “epic … rocking the Marvel Universe to its very foundations” and “the battle of the century.” It’s easy to see why no one bothers. In fact, looking at this cover alone tells the prospective reader all they need to know.
The book-selling question regarding the end of the world appears on the back, partially obscured by Namor’s four-foot-long ponytail, and worked into the image in such a way that it’s easy to gloss right over. The front of the book is mostly devoted to Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, violently thrusting his crotch in order to evade some kind of fireball. The guy throwing the fireball is on the back cover, but due to a clumsy bit of composition, it looks like it is being shot from the back of Morgan le Fey’s skull. The entire thing is given the deluxe treatment of an acetate overlay cover, which is probably the most superfluous cover gimmick of all time, having no function other than to trick you into maybe thinking something’s hidden behind the logo (Nothing is). And to think, they wanted us to pay four dollars. Outrageous, right?
Let’s step back from the cover, though, because frankly kicking someone when they’re down isn’t as fun as the Internet would have you believe. That said, it’s really hard not to kick Atlantis Rising, and it’s almost impossible to kick it as much as it seems to be kicking itself.
The whole thing started as an arc in Namor: The Sub-Mariner, a book that long struggled to find an audience, moving through dynamic, character-altering events such as “Namor grows a beard,” “Namor gets a ponytail,” and “Namor and Sue Richards finally just get it over with already” (though it’s worth noting that the tail end of the series had some fairly wonderful art by Geof Isherwood, a penciller who really needs to get more props online). Atlantis Rising was originally a six-issue arc slated to run from Namor #60-65. That’s all well and good, except that Namor was cancelled with #62. Rather than simply slouch away like a beaten animal, the storyline instead became something bigger and (theoretically) better: a crossover!
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This was the standard Marvel strategy for crossovers in the 90’s: Big Crossover Name #1 with a glitzy, glamorous cover; a bunch of hopefully but not necessarily related books picking up the thread (often with outside guest stars besides), then Big Crossover Name #2 with another fancy cover and tying everything up with a big fight and, fairly often, multiple artists. Atlantis Rising conforms to this model perfectly.
After the plot threads in Namor were left dangling, they got picked up in Fantastic Four: Atlantis Rising #1, which then led into two issues apiece of Fantastic Four, Fantastic Force, and Warlock and the Infinity Watch (The Inhumans and the mighty Thor also came into play, although the former didn’t have a series to involve, and the latter was busy fighting the Midgard Serpent in his own book). Then, when they’d all had their say, Fantastic Four: Atlantis Rising #2, again with an acetate overlay cover, wrapped up the main story and set plates spinning for the individual titles’ immediate futures. Or, well, most of the individual titles’ futures, because Warlock and the Infinity Watch was cancelled–its tie-ins were the book’s send-off. Fantastic Force lasted another nine issues. Fantastic Four persevered for another fourteen, before disappearing into Heroes Reborn for a while.
I think the picture is pretty clear–these were not popular books. According to the Diamond statistics at comichron.com, the final issue of Namor came in at #181 on the sales charts, over a hundred spots behind such enduring, talked-about classics as Leonard Nimoy’s The Primortals. Atlantis Rising #1, released the next month, made it to #65, barely edging out Beavis and Butt-Head #16. Fantastic Four itself ranked 20 spots higher, which is pretty much exactly the reverse of how crossovers typically work. Fantastic Force, meanwhile, was about seventy spots lower–doing even worse than Warlock and the Infinity Watch, which, if you’ll recall, was being cancelled. Atlantis Rising #2 dropped twenty spots the next month, giving Beavis and Butt-Head a crucial advantage, but still clocking in ahead of Star Wars: Droids (and, for that matter, Captain America… and Thor… and Punisher… and Daredevil… and Justice League…).
I’ve just flexed my fingers for a page or two to belabor one point: this crossover event did exactly nothing for its constituent books. It was just as profoundly ignored then as it is now. Even as an impressionable child, still reeling from shock at
Age of Apocalypse, I didn’t care. Someone at New England Comics gave me an
Atlantis Rising postcard checklist when he rang me up, and I think my response was to throw it away without looking at it when I got home.
So we’ve made fun of the goofy cover and then ground sand into it’s eyes by pointing out how totally irrelevant it was. What we haven’t done is address one crucial question: okay, so was it any good?
The prelude in Namor is one giant mixed message. As mentioned before, Geof Isherwood draws it well, having a knack for overblown, hypermuscled barbarian stuff (which suits Namor better than one might expect). Glenn Herdling mans the script, which concerns Namor and Andromeda (an Atlantean warrior-woman who in this story sports the most aggressive she-mullet you’ve ever seen) seeking out Triton of the Inhumans, believed dead in a submarine explosion or something (they don’t ever really explain it). Along the way, they fight the Blood Wraith, a member of the Class of 1993 Marvel Annuals created so that the issue could come with a collectible new-character trading card (and co-created by Herdling). Blood Wraith makes sense as a Namor foe. He uses the Ebony Blade, a cursed, soul-sucking murder-sword previously used by the Black Knight, and the weapon with which Namor was previously forced to slay his wife, Marrina. Meanwhile, a mystical pendant has transformed a marine researcher into Morgan le Fey, and she’s using Triton as her slave. The series ends with Namor accidentally grievously wounding Triton, which constitutes enough of a sacrifice for le Fey to raise Atlantis, because apparently she’s from there.
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Now, after reading all of that, here’s what you might expect: Namor, having inadvertently aided Morgan le Fey in raising Atlantis, must seek out the help of those heroes closest to him (and also Warlock and the Infinity Watch) to re-sink it, lest his water-breathing people die. The Inhumans will show up and be irate about Triton getting stabbed, and Blood Wraith and Andromeda will, in some way, have something to do with the storyline. Wrong. As it turns out, Namor himself barely appears in what’s to come, and Blood Wraith’s sword appears more or less out of the blue after seven issues.
After Namor’s blunder, we kick off with Atlantis Rising #1, scripted by Herdling from a plot by then-FF writer Tom DeFalco, and drawn by MC Wyman in what looks like the Extreme Studios house style: all muscles bulging like after an HGH binge, all speaking done via open-mouthed shouting (Wyman was also the regular penciler of Thor at the time; Atlantis Rising #1 credits four other artists with “Inks & Finishes”). The government calls in the Fantastic Four to deal with this whole Atlantis situation. And at the time, the FF was down one founding member, with Reed Richards having died around a year previously in some other huge event thing. So at this point, the FF was the Invisible Woman, the Thing, and the Human Torch, with semi-permanent hangers-on Ant-Man and Kristoff, Dr. Doom’s heir. A recurring character was Nathaniel Richards, Reed’s father and all-purpose meddling cyborg, who manages to accidentally break the Inhumans’ house on the moon, leading to an Inhuman invasion of Earth to retake Atlantis. Meanwhile, after seven pages or so of random Inhumans arguing about whether or not to go to Earth, Morgan le Fey conquers Thor in one panel. Thor and Namor fight, and the Fantastic Four go to the moon to shrink the Inhumans’ city and take it aboard their spaceship, which goes well until they re-bigulate Maximus the Mad and he overtakes them.
Reading it back to myself, that entire paragraph sounds way more complicated than it should, especially for one issue. And yet, I left stuff out fairly indiscriminately. One thing can be said in favor of Atlantis Rising: it works fast to set up a total fiasco for the heroes to fight their way through. It then immediately crashes that fiasco into the rocks, because all of that complicated, plot-juggling set-up I just described is the prelude to unconnected stories about people punching each other in the face, with no real rhyme or reason.
Another problem is that it assumes we care, rather than giving us reasons to. We’re simply meant to accept faceless Inhuman war hawks like “General Ator” as legitimate threats on the basis of a couple ranty panels and the fact that he’s abandoning his entire population to go invade Earth, which paints him as incredibly, incredibly stupid. The entire story barrels along at this breakneck pace, with things like character depth and plot logic taking distant second and third to “cram as many players onto the stage as possible, then make them all yell and hit each other.” The tie-ins seem to give up on weaving a coherent strain to follow nearly as soon as they start; it’s telling that Fantastic Force #8 bills itself as “Atlantis Rising: Part Two,” and no other tie-ins even try to maintain an illusion of sequence. Warlock and the Infinity Watch‘s issues don’t even have logos marking them as tie-ins, but then their interactivity with the plot is limited entirely to “a tsunami from Atlantis’ rising destroys their home and then the team breaks up.”
Justification for a reader’s indifference is easy to find when the creators seem to be confused about what it is they’re trying to accomplish. Is this a story about Morgan le Fey raising Atlantis? Is it a story about family connections of the Fantastic Force coming back to haunt them? Is it a story about Maximus the Mad fighting the Fantastic Four? Is it a story about the Inhumans invading Earth? About Devlor (remember Devlor?!) coming to terms with his genetic construction? About Namor’s son struggling to cope with the near-obliteration of the Atlantean people? About the Inhuman Royal Family clashing with the ruling Genetics Council? An excuse for big fight scenes? It’s a little bit of everything (mostly the last one), and it does none of these things particularly well.
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Atlantis Rising doesn’t even seem to come to a coherent point in the end, where we’re asked to believe that Namor has somehow suffered a “downfall” by the narration, despite having actually been absent for most of the story–which started in his own solo title. Indeed, though Atlantis suffers a great catastrophe, Namor was already exiled from his homeland, according to the prologue issues; and while he made a supreme ass of himself trying to punch Black Bolt’s head off, this is absolutely nothing uncharacteristic of Namor. Presumably, his “downfall” is his own shame at having helped raise Atlantis, but we’re only left to infer that; I’d call it a rare moment of restraint, but I imagine it was just editorial oversight. After all, at the end of the tale, Atlantis stays risen, but the death and displacement of millions are merely a statistic, whereas Namor’s tears are an event.
Looking back, it’s hard to see where Atlantis Rising may have had any effect whatsoever on anything. Namor currently rules Atlantis, who have either forgiven him for raising it, or just conveniently forgotten about it. Llyron, then-ruler of Atlantis who fled to find a new home for his injured people (and, in a completely bizarre epilogue, ordered all fertile Atlantean women implanted with a clone fetus of himself–thankfully, this plotline disappeared immediately), went away for years, only returning for a Thunderbolts story where a beating from the Radioactive Man gave him oddly contagious radiation poisoning. Morgan le Fey went back to sleeping with Doctor Doom and being chased by tyrannosaurs, or something. If Adam Warlock is at all troubled by the circumstances of his team’s dissolution, he shows it about as much as any other former member of the Infinity Watch: not at all, ever. Huntara and the other Fantastic Forcers continue to exist solely as a trivia question.
The story has two real impacts as far as lasting changes to the Marvel Universe: returning the Inhumans to Earth (where they would later star in Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee’s wonderful Marvel Knights revival), and moving the Human Torch to the Fantastic Force roster for a while. On that basis alone, you’re probably better off skipping it, unless you’re really desperate–but even then, it won’t satisfy. If you want an Extreme Studios crossover, then you’re better off just mainlining a pure hit of Extreme Destroyer, not watching Marvel fumble for cool points, like a middle-aged tourist wondering why his kids aren’t thrilled by the neon lanyard on his Ray-Bans.
