Donny Cates returns to Crossover, his most “meta” series, and he doesn’t just do it by writing it, he’s one of the series’ leads himself! The second installment of Image’s lauded series breaks away from the main plot to tell the stories of the creators, including the demiurge who has set up all this mess, Donny Cates. The relationship between the creator and his work determines the direction of the series, which changes the third and forgets about the epic to get closer to a metalinguistic experiment in which Cates and his companions Zdarsky or Kirkman reflect on their characters, and suffer the consequences of your decisions.
Crossover was a tribute to the works that in the 90s changed the panorama of North American comics
Image landed with force and with so many series that many did not know what distinguished them. Dark Horse did the same but at a lower level, Bravura and Malibu were born, all the authors embarked on the adventure of their own comics, Not all of them have continued, not all of those that follow have succeeded, and we don’t even talk about quality anymore. But they were the pioneers and that is very important. Cates was writing a world where reality and fiction had collided and the result was disconcerting. Fiction discovers that his drama, his pain was to entertain an audience that was never going to suffer from such sorrows. Many went into hiding and others were trapped. The reality is that a writer is the one who has created all this, both in reality and in the cartoons, Donny Cates.
Disappointing second installment
If the first arc was a good comic, with some nostalgia and homage, but with a fun and original plot, in this second everything changes. It becomes Cates’ Circus. The writer becomes the protagonist, and like Grant Morrison in the last issue of Animal Man, he enters the cartoons to explain the plot. Of course Morrison did it once, and he didn’t become the protagonist of the story. And less was justified by saying that this was his form of therapy to increase his self-esteem since his partner abandoned him.If the plot of creators and creations in a battle for the former to pay for the suffering they have distributed just to make their comics interesting and the appearance of Chip Zdarsky as a victim in a number was a great start, the ending with Cates as the guide is maddening. . And above all things is the fact that we have to see a good plot become a cry for attention and “casito” by the writer, which is not pleasant or fun.
But if something saves the whole set a little, it is that Geoff Shaw takes it seriously and treats the script with force to give it rhythm even in the midst of Cates’s complaints about his ex. The entry of the Powers series in the middle of the work makes everything gain strength by contrast, and the truth is that this arc needed it.
Conclusion
Crossover is a good series that has gone through an ups and downs because of the pain that the writer has suffered, and because he doesn’t know how to separate himself from his art and introduce himself only as an exercise in egomania. But even so, there are good wickers for a third party to contribute something more about whether fiction makes its creators twisted psychopaths who like to make their characters suffer, or on the contrary, they are artists who with these small examples create works that help many more than to the characters that harm.
Crossover 2Qualification: : Crossover 2url : comicsAuthor : Geoff Shaw, Dee Cunniffe, Donny CatesFormat : PaperbackPublication date : 2022-11-24ISBN: 9788411019743Description : Five years ago the fictional kingdom of comics collapsed onto our real world. Now, in the midst of the chaos, a new threat rises. Someone or something is killing comic book writers all over the country. Scott Snyder! Brian K. Vaughn! Chip Zdarsky! Robert Kirkman! Brian Michael Bendis! No one is safe in the bloody and explosive second volume of… Crossover! JOTA (JC Royo) 2.5 2.50 5 Average rating User rating /5 ( Be the first! Votes )
