Continued From Tuesday 31st August: "This Is The Day The Universe Dies!"
"Onslaught"
8.
The strangest thing about "Onslaught" is that it's actually the anti-Crisis. For in "Crisis", DC had set out to destroy an infinity of Earths, the entire fictional DC multiverse, and to as a consequence simplify the continuity of their books for readers new and old. "Onslaught", however, was actually created as a line-wide crossover to establish a frontline Marvel multiverse. And in dividing up the Marvel Universe into two quite separate and disassociated franchises, and in re-setting comic-book time for the inhabitants of one but not the other, Marvel had in effect created something of an Earth-1, containing its major franchise characters that were neither "street-level" heroes nor mutants, and an Earth-2, where the Marvel Universe proper would continue replete with costumed characters whose complex super-heroic histories stretched back for decades.
It was a remarkable project, the product of one of the most short-sighted and craven grasping-for-market-share decisions ever clutched at by an industry so often characterised by such half-witted designs. It quite ignored the fact that one of Marvel Comic's greatest unique selling points had always been the crowded universe within which its characters constantly ran round corners into each other, and in which they forever ended up fighting each other regardless of which side of the good/bad divide they occupied. But the lure of generating extra income by "outsourcing" if not actually selling off the family silver proved too much for the powers-that-were during that time of substantial contractions in the dangerously wounded comicbook marketplace. And so off went the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the Avengers and a number of ancillary characters to what was effectively an alternative Earth, though not Mr Fantastic and the Invisible Woman's young boy Franklin, presumably because the market that was now being so desperately sought might not want to read about married superheroes and their progeny.
9.
The structure of "Onslaught" therefore has an apparently far less complex and complicated job to do than that of "Crisis", which had to try to squeeze out meaning and excitement from the destruction of the entire history of DC Comics. But the essence of the two projects was in some ways remarkably similar. Both were concerned with the business of removing superfolks from a particular continuity while making the readership feel positive about the fact that these fundamental changes to the comicbook status quo had occurred. With "Onslaught", it'd been decided that a significant number of Marvel's more well-established superfolk had to disappear from the mainstream MU to another "pocket universe", where their histories could be reset and their origins seasoned with a more contemporary flavour in order to better engage, it was thought, with the audience of the mid-Nineties. And, as in Crisis, what was left of a companies cast of superheroes in the Marvel Universe after the culling of so many fundamentally important characters had to be coated with the air of tragedy and worthiness that best marks as heroes the good guys and gals who've fought the good fight, lost a great deal, but still come out with a better-than-nothing result.
Yet where DC wiped out a multiverse in "Crisis" and made that destruction a permanent matter, Marvel's "Onslaught" crossover helped to further establish a multiverse of its own without any sense that this separation into two of the MU was permanent. And this difference explains a significant part of why "Onslaught" could never match "Crisis" where the story-ending matters of catharsis and closure are concerned. No matter how similar the two crossovers seem to be in certain ways, "Crisis" was strengthened in its appeal by its definite purpose whereas "Onslaught" was weakened by the fact that nothing could be truly settled in its pages at all.
10.
For all the talk of "pocket-universes" and the "Franklin-verse", it was obvious to many that the consequence of "Onslaught" was effectively a Multiverse, and that, short of absolutely flogging off their characters rather than just the business of their production, crossovers and the movement of super-folks from the new world to the old would be inevitable given time. The very fact of two separate Earths containing different casts of superheroes, even if they're fundamentally the same even down to their trouser-tights, is an utterly irresistible story snare for creators and fans alike. Had the "Heroes Reborn" project outlived its thirteen month-long adventure, there's surely little doubt that as the months progressed, mutant superheroes and Avengers would have begun to nip backwards and forwards through the apparently totally-impenetrable dimensional wall - or whatever it was - until the whole construction would have eventually arrived at a point just as convoluted as the DC Multiverse had been perceived to be. Like the old "Onion" story about a fat divorced man losing weight in order to get married once more, so that he can safely pile on the pounds again, the universes of super-folks get stripped of their complicated and often counter-productive histories only so that they can generate more of the same in the future.
If "Crisis" could be seen to have successfully settled DC Comics internal debate about what its future course should be, "Onslaught" merely complicated matters further for Marvel.
11.
It's worth speculating whether the creators of "Onslaught" tailored the degree of threat posed by the villainous Onslaught to the rather less than world-ending scenario that they knew their story would end on. After all, the basic mission of "Onslaught" as a story was limited to the transference of two dozen or so superpeople from one fictional universe to another, a project which might've been concluded in the background of a single George Perez panel in " Crisis". For all the excess and hype associated with "Onslaught", it's many, many pages were therefore absorbed with what seems like a relatively simple, straight-forward and less than planet-shattering end. It's appropriate, therefore, that "Onslaught" largely confined its scenes of cataclysmic destruction to the perennially-devastated and perpetually quickly-recovered-from-disaster New York City. NYC has so often served as a metaphor for the entire world anyway in Marvel Comics that it was easy for Onslaught's audience to read its constant battering, and the perpetual sense of it always being in jeopardy from Sentinel or super-villain, as a sign of a significant threat without the story needing to involve any greater scale of physical disaster. And the fact that just about every Marvel superhero lived either in or around NYC gave a focus to the conflict and increased the intensity of the long-running battling on view within it accordingly, without inflating the already-bloated narrative to the point where the already absurd extremes of comic-book showdowns became laugh-out-loud disproportionate to the stakes at hand.
If the loss to a superhero universe isn't going to be so very great, we might speculate, following the example of "Crisis" where the casualties were pretty much total, then the calamities which mark that loss ought not to overstate the narrative's importance. The world, and indeed all the possible worlds of the Marvel Universe, didn't need to be forever threatened in "Onslaught" in order to make the reader glad for whatever remained after the fighting, because the scale of the culling in the MU of 1996 was so much less than that in the DCU of 1985. In fact, nobody dies at all in "Onslaught"; they just get shuffled elsewhere, making the defeat that the story concluded with far far less acute than that of "Crisis". Is that why the stakes of the story were so remarkably familiar and commonplace in the hyper-excited terms of Marvel Universe, where mutants were forever threatening to wipe out homo homo sapiens?
And if Onslaught had been engaged in a project which was far more upsetting to the status quo, involving perhaps a number of familiar if redundant supporting characters done to death, or more fundamental and lasting changes in terms of continuity, would the stories conclusion have seemed even more overblown as a consequence, with such a greater measure of spectacle and destruction having been invested in setting the scene for what was merely the perhaps-temporary expelling of a few dozen characters from here to there?
Can it be, perhaps, that by design or chance or more likely a collision of the two, "Onslaught" is another example of a challenging project where the antagonist's ends and means are kept appropriately in balance with the narrative's intended conclusion?
12.
However, so that the readers wouldn't forget that a great deal of importance was still supposedly at stake in "Onslaught", in emotional terms if not in those of the body-count, Onslaught's stated intention to wipe out the Earth's non-mutant population was always situated at the fore of events. This similarly carried a far far lower level of threat than that of "Crisis", because while the readers of the DCU's grand 1985 crossover knew that alternate Earths and their often-beloved inhabitants were surely going to perish, "Onslaught's" consumers could be pretty sure that the MU wasn't going to be swept free of its 6 billion or so non-mutant inhabitants.
Even a company so insanely run as to hive off many of their most important characters into a "Franklin-verse" weren't going to allow an Earth consisting of nobody but a few thousand mutants to emerge blinking and quite defenceless into the marketplace. The fight was therefore in a sense fixed from the off. And so the sense of threat carried by Onslaught was far less unnerving than that of the Anti-Monitor, and no matter how that was in tune with the limited losses that the book would inflict upon the Marvel Universe, it left the various chapters of the crossovers with the sense that there was a great deal of huffing and puffing, but consistently rather less of the houses being blown down than such a well-trumpeted and bloated event might seem to require.
13.
But despite having a page-count far exceeding that of "Crisis", there simply wasn't very much to achieve in narrative terms where the many chapters of "Onslaught" were concerned. Yes, the basic staples of the "disastrous-crossover" genre were attended to; everything had to go wrong, the villain had to credibly threaten to destroy a great deal of significance, and, for a dramatic conclusion, the "Heroes Reborn" characters had to disappear bravely too. Here too "Crisis" had an advantage as a narrative. Those good super-gals and guys who survived the Anti-Monitors assault were in themselves ennobled just by the fact that they fought and to a tiny degree won through. The audience's response to that fact was simple; everyone who made it through the war, or indeed fell during it, was a hero worthy of our attention. But "Onslaught" was left with the business of how to make those superheroes who didn't apparently nobly perish in destroying the villain look as heroic as those who did, and it's a problem that the narrative never succeeded in solving. The likes of the X-Men who were placed outside Onslaught's body were given heroic roles, but the fact remained that they didn't save their colleagues and they didn't make the heroic sacrifice that the likes of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers did either. No matter how "fair" it is to judge those characters for being fortunate enough to have survived, the emotional truth of the matter is straightforward; the superfolks who apparently perished had behaved in a way that's far closer to the traditional definition of "heroic" than those who didn't.
And so "Onslaught" left the Marvel Universe not just denuded of many of its most important characters, but also of a measure of the heroic mystique of those who remained. Indeed, I've often wondered if the decline of the X-Men as a franchise in the MU could be traced in some fashion to "Onslaught", to the moment when the management thought that the mutants could be so placed at the centre of the Marvel Universe, ignoring the fact that even the loveliest dome only exists because some far less enticing but essential and impressive architecture exists to support it. Certainly, the whole story made the X-Men seem almost peripheral to the MU when compared to their lost and so-mourned fellows, which was never of course the intent of "Onslaught".
But then who can compare with well-loved martyrs?
14.
The truth is that nobody seemed to have worked out exactly what to do with all of those single issues in the "Onslaught" crossover. Consequently, the individual chapters when read again today seem notable mainly for the fact that nothing much ever happens, and that that which does occur seems to be a repeat of whatever has come before; Onslaught blusters and threatens a great deal, beats a few folks up, tortures the odd psychic and then disappears to do pretty much exactly the same the next time around. It's a static and yet simultaneously furious affair, of which all the mind can recall is a wave of superheroes rushing this way and then that, being beaten by Onslaught here and then being beaten again by him there, over and over again, until the sense of the story seems to quite break down into the memory of a sequence of ever-less-thrilling cliffhangers.
By the tales' final confrontation, the familiarity of the manic and inconclusive fighting has obviously become so ubiquitous to the creators that panels showing desperate superheroes racing to the last battle can also contain Reed and Sue Richards standing still and declaring their love for each other at a considerable cooing length when their colleagues are being beaten once again into pulp in the couple's absence. It's as the business of fighting Onslaught has become so much of a 24/7 situation that every other human activity has to take place in the presence of the continual punch-up, as if the last stand of the 300 at Thermopylae occurred while King Leonidas and his favourite boy hairdresser cuddled and whispered niceties, while the Persians kindly worked around them and their fellow Spartans politely ignored the lack of help coming from their direction. When there's nothing but superfolks rushing around and thumping one another, narrative sense can very quickly disappear and every event seem to need to be accompanied by at least a background of mighty battlers having at each other.
Consequently, the end of the crossover comes as both a shock, because "Onslaught" seems at times to be set to continue unchangingly forever, and a relief, because it's over. Again, this isn't how "Crisis On Infinite Earths" was structured, for no matter what its many faults, every individual chapter of "Crisis" had its own specific purpose and identity, and, as we've discussed, its conclusion closed one epoch of the DCU and opened other in a satisfying and definitive fashion.
15.
It's this problem of purpose which most bedevils "Onslaught". The narrative is repetitive because it has an incredibly constrained set of goals to fulfil, beyond filling up a half-dozen issues a month until the editorial office declares that it's all over. The rented-out super-powered properties are to be removed from the reader's sight in the "Earth-Two" MU, but they aren't to be forgotten there, and there has to be a sense that they may one day return, because that may well happen. This leaves the story needing to generate a great deal of emotional heat to make the reader feel that events are truly of consequence, and that's an incredibly difficult business for the creators to deal with, for where is the emotional emphasis of the story to be placed? Is it upon the Marvel Universe's loss, which can't be too substantially emphasised, for that would diminish the worth of the original property? Is it upon the possibility of everything rolling back together at some unspecified and possibly never-to-arrive point, which would create an unsatisfying sense that all of this great crossover was in fact for nothing at all? Is this a tragedy for the characters who are leaving, or those who are staying, and if it's a tragedy for those left behind, then how can their existence avoid being a shadow of the new world being created for their sainted and supposedly-dead comrades?
None of these issues were ever tellingly nailed down so that they might be consistently worked towards, if the evidence of the published chapters of "Onslaught" is to be trusted. There's always the sense of a simple and repetitive narrative that somehow manages despite it's own lack of complexity to fail to find an emotional core to link events together with. If "Crisis On Infinite Earths" can be seen as a fantastically effective card trick, turning the readers away from all that loss to celebrate the small measure of survival, then "Onslaught" is an unshuffled deck in search of a wily magician, and in truth it's hard to see how it could be otherwise. For while the crossover was being written, none of those involved in its creation knew how the "Heroes Reborn" project was going to proceed, and many apparently disapproved of the whole business anyway. Consequently, "Onslaught" was shackled to two contradictory purposes, since it had to end in a fashion which appeared to be definitive and emotionally satisfying, and yet it also had to leave every avenue open in order to accommodate the uncertain future.
In the light of that, there's no surprise in realising that the pages immediately following the death of Onslaught and the disappearance of the martyred superfolks are concerned less with the kind of reflection and closure that's found in "Crisis", and more with the setting into train of future events in the Marvel Universe proper. For Marvel was now positioned into fighting with itself, as one set of books fought another in the marketplace in order to see which business model was going to win out. A centrally-directed Marvel Universe or a series of franchises? A Marvel Universe rump containing the profitable X-titles and whatever else couldn't be hived off?
In such an atmosphere did the creators of "Onslaught" try to serve every possible outcome for both their real-world and fictional conflicts, and it's actually a considerable surprise and pleasure to note how often their work is enjoyable, if never entirely convincing or, indeed, moving.
16.
"Behold my mighty hand." declares Onslaught in X-Men # 55, prompting all but the most serious-minded reader to surely wonder what's wrong with the other hand that it should be considered so unmighty and so unworthy of being beholden. And the portentous tone that can be found in "Crisis" is here matched and considerably intensified. It's as if the dialogue alone is carrying much of the sense that something of incredible import is happening. And it's ironic that Marvel Comics, which had always prided itself on being more "believable" and "everyday" than its competitors, had long since collapsed into a company where the most stiff and jarring dialogue was spoken by pretty much all of its characters, and this ten years after not just "Crisis", but also "Watchman", which had seemed to promise something more than a constant and wearing process of arm-waving Sturm und Drang for the future of the superhero. (It's a mark of how many writers were producing scripts for Marvel at around this time that this dreadful dialogue could be the norm even when the estimable likes of the Simonsons, Busiek, Waid, David and Stern were or had in the recent past also been contributing their far superior scripts too.*1 ) When Storm announces that one of Onslaught's attacks "... sounded like a nuclear blast at ground level.", the writing's been turned up far beyond 11 and no-one's even wondering how Ororo could possibly know what it was like to stand at the heart of a nuclear explosion and, er, listen to it. (Given that she seems to have relatively human ears, one would think that the experience would not have left her with a simple sound-memory, even if the heat equivalant to that at the centre of the sun had somehow not instantly vapourised her.) But this was a crossover which was going to run and run, and the process of dragging things out quickly fell to lots of shouting, posing and unresolved fighting.
And yet amidst this, Onslaught remains, just as the Anti-Monitor did, a perfect villain for a one-off, if tantrically-prolonged, tale. He has no personality whatsoever of his own, which means, once more, that the audience can accept him as a force of nature, or a symbol of such. Unlike the Anti-Monitor, he's far less likely to indulge in any standard super-villain behaviour beyond declaring that everything will end and everyone will die while tempting young Franklin Richards into some kind of complicity. As flat as an major super-villain can possibly be, composed of apparently the "evil" of Magneto and Professor X, as if being bad is a quality rather than an action, there's little of substance that ever could peak out from behind his necessary mask, again underlining that this is not a human being and must not be mistaken for such.
Indeed, so perfectly does Onslaught conform to the expected tropes of the super-villain that he even has his own secret hideout where he tortures teenagers and young boys, though here the unique contribution of the character to the genre is that the prison is somewhere deep inside the character himself. (Well, he has the power of a "Psionic whirlwind", so we might presume that anything's possible.)
*1 - I believe Mr Waid has discussed how his X-Men scripts of the period were often re-written without his knowledge or consent. I may be wrong here, so has anyone a reference that might establish the matter beyond the evidence of my untrustworthy memory?
17.Of course, Onslaught has been returned to life since, just as the Anti-Monitor has, and the reader only has to study these character's Wiki pages to feel the will to read onwards diminishing at an overwhelming rapid pace. For none of the informing detail counts for a thing. These are cyphers create to growl, destroy and die at exactly the moment when their triumph seems to be complete. Indeed, both did die splendidly, and both at the climax of events, an absolutely key plot element which we'll touch upon again when considering "Ultimatum". The reader's relief at their passing, as we've discussed, masked to differing degrees the reader's disappointment at what the villain's been permitted to do, and makes that which has been saved seem all the more precious in the light of all that's been lost. It's just a pity that the various issues mentioned above left the Marvel Universe in the wake of "Onslaught" a far less fit-for-purpose entity than "Crisis" had succeeded in establishing for the DCU.
But despite Onslaught's splendidly shallow and relentless nature, the danger he posed was never serious enough to compensate for the loss of the key optioned-out Marvel superheroes. And unlike the passing of the Anti-Monitor, which left the single and new DC Earth feeling safe and fit-for-purpose where future stories were concerned, the months after Onslaught's passing only accentuated the fact that the Marvel Universe had been depopulated of so many of its most familiar and structurally- informing characters. Perhaps if Marvel's editorial committee had decided to destroy more of their precious universe while they were allowing it to be gutted of so many of its most important resources, the conclusion of "Onslaught" would have felt more satisfying, and the loss more worthwhile.
More centrally, the loss of the "Heroes Reborn" characters hadn't been excised from the memory of their fellow MU characters, as that of the Crisis was in the DCU, where the public forgot about the multiple Earths immediately and the heroes soon followed suit. But then unlike "Crisis", "Onslaught" wasn't a fresh start willingly grasped by a committed editorial and creative team, regardless of reservations elsewhere in the company. "Heroes Reborn" was an amputation imposed by misguided businessmen running a company right into the ground, and no amount of narrative captions declaring that "The air rung with atomic thunder." could hide that. And Marvel's continuity, and Marvel's creators understandable sentimentality, demanded that the absence of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four be constantly refereed to, most successfully in Kurt Busiek's "Thunderbolts". It wasn't just that much of the heart of the Marvel Universe was gone, but that nobody could shut up about it either. Nobody was good enough to fill the boots of those missing, nobody could rest until they knew what had happened to their comrades and protectors. The whole process, and the monthly presence of the "Heroes Reborn" books on the stands, for all their virtues as well as their failings, merely accentuated that the fictional reality of the MU had been torn apart for economic, and daft economic, reasons rather than according to any convincing narrative logic. As a consequence, "Onslaught", which faced so many challenges as a monthly event, saw the effect of its conclusion further diminished with every passing month.
But in truth, the fatal weakness of "Onslaught" was that the departing Marvel characters hadn't satisfyingly sacrificed themselves so that the MU could go on. They'd been sacrificed in an unsatisfying fashion so that corporate interests could attempt to squeeze more money out of the properties they controlled. Onslaught's threat, fury and destruction could do nothing to counteract this feeling that the MU, and its characters, had been considerably diminished. And so, "Onslaught" as an event couldn't function and close as "Crisis" had.
And yet, it was also true that many of Marvel's creators and fans didn't want "Onslaught" to be the kind of full stop that "Crisis" was anyway. They were unconvinced by its premise and its consequences, and, for all these reasons,"Onslaught served as nothing more than one excessive event in a procession of many others. "Crisis On Infinite Earths" had by contrast closed off the narratives of the DCU's Multiverse with such Alexandrian severity that, in the way of the Giordian Knot, there was nothing much left of what had gone before and no character who'd survived it could be made to say how it had all fitted together anyway. Unlike at Marvel, DC's superheroes had collectively forgotten that the almost-worst had already happened, and the various creators involved in the "new" DCU were headed off down a different path far away from the likes of Earth 2 and, indeed, Earth's 52. (*2)
And in these differences, perhaps, might lie a hint or two about how creators calibrate their crossover events so that readers will accept the degree of change to the status quo on offer without feeling cheated by the conclusions or alienated by the consequences of the stories. These matters will be of particular relevance when we engage upon a joust with "Ultimatum" next time around on this blog, where we'll consider the attempts of its creative team to satisfyingly and productively disrupt and reset the equilibrium of Marvel's Ultimate Universe.
*2 - Well, most of them. The likes of Mark Waid and later Grant Morrison would wage guerrilla warfare against the absolute prohibition of the Multiverse and its history well into the new era.
I hope you might consider joining me for a look at "Ultimatum" in the very near future. Please do let me know the mistakes I've undoubtedly made in the above. I'll correct them and of course credit you. My thanks for all and any for reading and I wish you as always a very splendid day!
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