Now, I’ll get to New Avengers in a minute, but one last thing about the New Avengers Annual. And Silent War. And X-Men: Emperor Vulcan. And I’m sure another mini-series or two that I’ve forgotten because it was really easy to when THEY DON’T END.
Silent War ended with Luna goes ot Black Bolt for help, asking him what they’re supposed to do next and … black page. The New Avengers Annual had enough going on but Doctor Strange, an infinitely interesting character has departed for parts unknown to redefine and discover himself and who knows when we’re going to see that journey. X-Men: Emperor Vulcan has the Starjammers defeated, Vulcan triumphant and… the end. Suck it, folks! Pray we return to this storyline some time in the near future so you can get some closure.
It’s not a big trend, but it’s a ridiculous one and I, for one, would like to see a date, a title, a sketch, just something when the reader hits a wall. Don’t lead us up with all this plot and then expect us to drop it just because you changed the channel. I want to know what’s going on with the Inhumans! I can’t just pretend they don’t exist, especially now that I was TOTALLY RIGHT and Black Bolt was a Skrull after all.
And the worst thing is, we have no idea if anyone’s going to remember that Scott Summer’s brother and his daughter are in chains somewhere under his megalomaniacal brother he forgot in the Shi’ar Empire. We have no idea if anyone even wants to continue that story. I’m pretty sure David Hine said he wanted to come back to the end of Silent War… someday.
I’m sure there are more out there, more dangling plot-threads and endings that seemed to go nowhere or characters who went off to do something monumental and were never heard from again when that journey would make a kick-ass trade. There should be a law (just like the title of this cartoon!) that when pitching an idea like this, there should be at least an idea of when the freakin’ ending is going to show up. It should not be withheld from the public for fear of ’spoilers’. A reader should be able to pick up a comic enjoy the stories and know that the end is, if not here, at the very least nigh. This does not pick on series that never finish due to publishing problems, this is only for those stories in which someone thought it would be awesome to leave you hanging with no sense of having accomplished something for having read the story. No matter how entertaining you are, you should have to GO SOMEWHERE, not just excuse someone else’s story.
One Comment
Wait, wasn’t the whole point of a mini-series that it was a self-contained story? One that had a beginning, middle, and end? Whatever happened to that?
With DC producing mini-series with endings (and sometimes beginnings) that occur in other comics, and Marvel leaving stories hanging, what is the point any more?