The mainstream superhero obsession with company wide crossovers continues, as Marvel foists their latest “Incoming” upon the audience, a story that stinks of Identity Crisis elements, and even worse is it will lead into yet another event in 2020 called “Empyre”.
Incoming opens with a new murder mystery in the Marvel Universe, as the Masked Raider stumbles across a dead body inside a locked room. Numerous Marvel heroes are drawn into the resulting investigation, including Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Blue Marvel, Jessica Jones and Mister Fantastic.
As that investigation unfolds, readers are treated to new teases for major conflicts that will unfold over the course of 2020, such as a public backlash to teen heroes, Mister Sinister secretly creating hybrid mutant clones and the symbiote god Knull making his way to Earth.
Mister Fantastic and his allies eventually discover the murder victim is actually a Kree sleeper agent named Bel-Dann, and track down his Skrull opposite, Raksor. Both characters originally appeared in The Dark Phoenix Saga, tasked with observing the battle between the X-Men and the Shi’ar Imperial Guard for their respective empires and eventually forming an unlikely bond. Now, however, the two have been collaborating on a much different mission.
It all sounds pathetically familiar, to say nothing of an excuse to turn out many more crossovers by extension. That this is a sleeper agent of the Kree is no improvement, because there have already been too many plots like these during the time Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso were EICs for Marvel, like Secret Invasion.
And of course, there’s that insufferable problem of too many crossovers, which both take away stand-alone storytelling and long cost too much in cover list price. Not to mention when you set up so many crossovers almost back to back, it just compounds the farce. Even if the crossovers C.B. Cebulski’s overseeing aren’t overtly political in nature, they’re still doing considerable harm to Marvel, and let’s hope the audience at large has learned why it doesn’t pay to buy these superfluous projects.
Originally published here.
Indie comic creator and Youtube personality Richard Meyer had this to add:
