The Pitt
Few remember - and maybe with good reason - the end of Marvel's late-'80s experiment, the New Universe, in which a man driven mad with seemingly-unlimited power accidentally turns Pittsburgh into a radioactive crater by trying to get rid of his powers, and the world goes to hell from that point onwards: America becomes filled with irradiated monsters, nuclear war and godlike children who demand that we make war no more, or else. A weird and forgotten piece of post-Watchmen superheroics, but one that mixes old-school and new-school with an admittedly naive worldview that still may be too big for one movie.

Secret Wars
One of comics' first as-many-superheroes-at-once extravaganza, it's not just the idea of bringing the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four and random other characters (Spider-Man! The Hulk!) together to battle an army of supervillains that might make this colorful story too expensive to film, but the creation of a patchwork planet for them to fight on, along with the various alien races and/or technology that they meet along the way. Then again, the comic was created to support a 1980s toyline, and we all know how well Transformers and GI Joe have done for movie studios, so perhaps we should never say never...

Ultimatum
This year's strange superhero disaster movie killed off a number of Marvel's more popular characters, amongst them Wolverine, Thor and Doctor Doom - but only in their alternate timeline, "Ultimate" incarnations. Nonetheless, the story - in which Magneto causes all manner of "natural" disasters, destroys New York and decimates the superhero population of the planet before finally being stopped by a mix of X-Men and other superheroes - is pretty much 2012 with added superheroes, the idea of which may be the ultimate (No pun intended) high concept, but the cost of which would make most effects budgets weep.

Invasion!
DC's 1988 crossover is ID4 meets Star Wars, and then some: Different races of alien invade Earth to find out why the planet keeps producing so many superheroes, in the process destroying Australia (This is back when you could do that kind of thing without people getting upset that you've killed off an entire continent), performing genetic experiments on normal humans to see if there's some latent superhero gene (There is) and fighting a war on two fronts, as Earth's superheroes defend their planet with the help of some turncoat aliens. With a cast that's about 50% alien (And multiple types of alien, at that, with only a couple achievable with Star Trek-esque nose attachments), space battles and all manner of high-scale superheroic takes on your favorite war movies, this would be a sfx extravaganza... If anyone would ever be able to afford it.

Flex Mentallo
Flipping between "reality," imaginary worlds, time periods and everywhere in between, Flex may just be one of those unfilmable projects even before you start to think about how much it'd cost to have an army of superheroes destroy a city, combine to form a new reality that we live in, or even just have the orgy that proves Frederic Werthem right. But factor in the need to create surreal fictitious cities for the young Wally to get lost in, atomic explosions and mutations or even just costumes to match Frank Quitely's awesome fashion sense, and you're left with the kind of movie that would need Watchmen-esque precision and care, but for an even-less mainstream audience friendly story.

DC One Million
Again, just the scale of work needed to bring this story to life would make most people in charge of budgets get nervous: Taking place in two different eras (Today and the 853rd century), on multiple planets and with large-scale destruction brought about by a nano-technological virus that comes from a living robotic sun, the necessary design process alone would probably scare off movie producers before it even came to the idea of making it all look convincing. A cast of hundreds of superheroes from both eras (Including a Superman from the future who has to sparkle, just like Twilight's Edward) would just add to cost woes.

Crisis On Infinite Earths
Talking of casts of hundreds of superheroes, DC's 1985 big daddy of all superhero crossovers is the kind of thing that would have to be told in a series of movies, and even then would still be missing all manner of greatness: Requiring multiple Earths to be created just so they could be destroyed, taking place in multiple time periods - including a part of the story where the time periods merge together so we get to see World War II fighter planes fight dinosaurs - and with almost every character in the story (and there really are hundreds) a superhuman and requiring some level of ridiculous costume and special effects to be made real. While it might not be the greatest comic ever (Or even the greatest superhero comic), this might be the most perfect example of a story that is too full of ideal comic book imagination and spectacle to ever make it to the silver screen.

Coming from the comics background that I do, the first exposure I had to parallel earths was probably DC's Earth-1, Earth-2 and so on; different versions of the same planet that existed at "different vibrational frequencies" to each other, and had different versions of the same characters (On Earth-2, Superman is older - and has a different "S" on his chest! It blew my little childhood mind), but it wasn't until Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror" episode that I completely fell in love with the concept of there being multiple versions of the same characters in worlds just slightly different from our own.

It's hard for me to explain just why the idea appeals to me so much (Or why I was so thrilled to discover that Schrödinger's cat was, in fact, not the invention of Peter Milligan). Maybe it's really is that I'm indecisive, and love the idea that any decision anyone makes can be made differently by the same person on another Earth somewhere, or perhaps it's just the basic thrill of seeing the road less traveled becoming a little less "less traveled". Nonetheless, it remains one of my favorite SF ideas, and an easy way to bypass my critical faculties (Clone Wars writers, take note). After all, who couldn't love a multiverse full of possibilities?

Here's what's really going on. Big science fiction franchises used to have incredibly complicated storylines. But nowadays, the storylines are simple but the differences between the stories are complex.

Take Superman: there used to be only one version of the Superman saga, stretching back decades and including a super-monkey and a super-horse. But now, you have pre-Crisis and post-Crisis Superman, plus All-Star Superman, Smallville Superman, Donner Superman and whatever new version will appear in the next movie. Each version has a fairly simple story, but you have to have a PhD in geekology to understand where they diverge.

This isn't just an accident caused by different creators wanting to put their stamp on a character. It's a deliberate attempt to appeal to mainstream audiences while giving hardcore fans something to geek out about. Ideally, the average Smallville viewer barely thinks about how the show's version of Clark Kent is different from Christopher Reeve's. But the die-hard minority can spend hours obsessing about the differences, like whether, and at what point, Pa Kent dies.

It's like dog-whistle fanservice, the fine art of sticking in references that will drive fans nuts but go over the head of regular viewers/readers.

When I mentioned pre-Crisis and post-Crisis above, you either nodded your head wisely and thought about Harbinger's ribbed crotch (it represents the striations of the timelines), or you just shrugged at the appearance of more super-babble. But the Crisis On Infinite Earths was arguably the beginning of our current era of faux complexity. In 1986, DC Comics decided its universe was both too silly and too complex, and decided to "reboot" it with a 12-issue miniseries that is now unreadable. (Seriously, it reads like the begats, with tons of random cameos and obscure references.) After the series was done, the universe nearly ended, but instead it restarted, with only one universe instead of a multiverse. But DCU 2.0 wasn't stable, and needed a patch (1995's Zero Hour). In the past few years, the creators have gotten a bit happy with the reboot button, hitting it over and over again in series like Infinite Crisis, 52 and Final Crisis. It's like the universe is constantly blue-screening.

But anyway, the idea behind CIOE was to make things simpler and more friendly to new readers. And at first, this worked reasonably well. Creators like Frank Miller and John Byrne put their stamp on the old-school DC superheroes, and everybody had a clear backstory. Until each new batch of creators wanted to put their own stamp on the characters, and you ended up with things like: "Hawkman is a Native American Egyptian archeologist from outer space."

More importantly, though, fans could spend hours discussing the differences between the pre-Crisis and post-Crisis versions of their favorite characters. The Platonic ideal of the Crisis-break is that it would be opaque to the occasional readers of Superman comics, who would have an easier time reading because they wouldn't have to worry about whether the Composite Superman was still a reverse antimatter proctologist. And the reboot would provide "jumping-on points" for new readers to start reading without worrying that they missed something. It would only be transparent to the detail-obsessed fans.

(A side note: I feel as though in the past, when there were multiple continuities, there was much more of an effort to have the "canon" continuity and the non-canon versions. So you knew the Superman in the comics was really canonical, and other versions didn't "count." Or the Star Trek movies counted but the books didn't. Or something. But now, when you have multiple movie continuities contradicting each other, it's become impossible to keep up with.

Probably the last franchise that seemed to be trying to have one unified continuity was Star Wars, which at least claimed that all of the comics, video games, books and now TV shows were in continuity. George Lucas even said a few times that he would never make any movies after Return Of The Jedi because the post-ROTJ story had already been told in the novels. But even the maniacal SW mono-culture has become a giant tangle, according to "continuity cop" Leland Chee, who laments that George Lucas has a habit of tossing out long-accepted facts when it suits him, and introducing new "facts" like "Anakin built C3PO" Says Chee, "George's view of the universe is his view... He's not beholden to what's gone before.")

So what's the problem? The casual viewers can ignore the differences between Ultimate Spider-Man, Amazing Spider-Man and Tobey Spider-Man, and the fans can obsess about them. And everybody's happy, right?

Sort of. The problem is that the distinction between casual and intensive consumers of geeky culture is breaking down. Take comics: They're meant to be read by kids, especially tweens and teens, and then discarded. There's supposed to be immense turnover among comics readers, so that people reading Zero Hour would never even have read CIOE. The die-hard fans would be aware of the older stories, but not the fickle readers, who were only in it for a few years. The same goes for TV and movies to some extent: superhero and space opera shows and movies are supposed to attract a young, Ritalin-addled audience, who tune out after a few years, because they've started a garage band or gone to college.

But that kind of churn among consumers of escapist entertainment isn't happening the way it used to. Instead, things like Trek and superheroes are going "mainstream," which means it's cool for people to follow them longer term. As regular people stick with these narratives for longer periods, they're likely to become more aware of the endless reboots and revamps and divergences and reinventions. And to some extent, it may be exciting, like a revamped brand — the 2009 Mazda Miata or New And Improved Bounty — but over time, it may start to get annoying. (Which is why I think, in spite of the cruddiness of Spider-Man 3, Sony did the right thing bringing back Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi instead of trying to reboot Spidey.)

The other problem with this endless proliferation of alternate versions is one I alluded to earlier: it's fake complexity. Instead of having stories that are complicated and multi-layered, we can have lots of simplistic stories. You can distract yourself from the limitations of these one-track stories by thinking about how they differ. But that only works for a while. After a time, you get tired of facile storylines with tons of version numbers, and you start to crave one single storyline that gets more elaborate, satisfying and addictive as it goes along. Let's hope Hollywood can take its greasy fingers off the reboot button long enough to give it to us one of these days.

The basic Anti-Monitor action pack comes with one giant Anti-Monitor figure, a few other figures and a map. Anti himself has three different levels of power representing his awesome cosmic might in the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The con exclusive Anti-Monitor will represent his more recent incarnation as a member of the Sinestro Corps. In addition to a repaint and a corps emblem on his chest, he'll have a totally different combat dial with reduced power levels, making him easier to fit onto a standard team. Image by: Wizkids.

Announcing 2008 Convention Exclusives! [Wizkids]

"Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again!": What you have to remember at all times is that you should use this line, or variations on it, at all times when talking about your event, but fail to actually follow through on it. On the rare occasions when you appear to follow through, leave yourself at least two different ways of getting out of it if the fan backlash becomes too loud. Case in point: Marvel's Civil War can easily be undone if all of the pro-registration heroes are revealed to have been undercover aliens or brainwashed into becoming fascist dictators. Or, for that matter, if the Scarlet Witch re-writes reality, as per-House of M. Or Mephisto gets rid of another marriage. Or one of another hundred of reasons.

(The corollary of that statement is "What the hell happened?": There should be a point in the center of each event where even the most jaded fan feels the stirrings of something resembling hope that maybe, just maybe, this one will be different and actually mean something. A plot point, perhaps, which promises the potential of real change and growth for characters or a situation. This point should be immediately followed by a return to the status quo or as close to the status quo as is possible while still pretending to be something new. Think of the aftermath of Civil War where none of the "unregistered" heroes had to actually deal with the fact that they're theoretically being hunted down by government forces and breaking the law. Yes, I know that the New Avengers keep being threatened with arrest every couple of issues. But each time that they do, those threatening arrest always change their mind and let them walk away, so it really doesn't count.)

"No-one Gets Out Of Here Alive!": No "event" is complete without a superhero or two dying. What you have to remember is to make sure that the superhero dying is one who is well known enough for fans to feel something approaching nerd emotion but not popular enough to actually matter. See: Any of the body count in DC's Infinite Crisis. I mean, people got their arms ripped off and their heads punched off their bodies, and besides the fact that they were Teen Titans, I have no idea who they were. This idea ties in tightly with...

"From Out Of The Ashes... A Hero Reborn!": If you're killing off some characters, it's only fair to renew some trademarks at the same time. The ideal crossover book will set up multiple new comics to spin off, most if not all of which will be critical and commercial flops that ultimately sully whatever credibility your event will have. For example: Civil War spun out Heroes for Hire, World War Hulk spun out Warbound and Gamma Corps and Infinite Crisis spun out (deep breath) The Trials of Shazam, OMAC and a Creeper book that I can't even remember the name of.

The most important lesson to remember when crafting your ideal superhero crossover epic, of course, is "Everything Can Be Solved With Punching": Sure, it makes the rubes lay down their hard-earned dollars by having some kind of psychological hook to sell your story on ("The heroes of the DC Universe have ideological differences regarding killing!" "The heroes of the Marvel Universe don't know who to trust because of alien invaders!"), but just remember this: There is no problem that can't be solved with good, old-fashioned violence. And if there is, then that's not something that people will want to read (Who really remembers, for example, DC's Genesis, where superheroes tried to discover the shared root of their superpowers without punching, or The Final Night, where superheroes tried to relight the extinguished sun without punching? Exactly). Look at some recent greats: Infinite Crisis started with Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman having fallen out over the murder of a supervillain, and by the end had turned into everyone punching an evil Superboy. Result? Happy fans.

Civil War was initially about whether superheroes needed to be trained in order to be superheroes, but ended with Captain America whaling on Iron Man before losing when he was too much of a pussy to beat his privileged face into mush. Fans may have been upset when Cap lost, but it wasn't because he had the better argument - It was because he had given up punching. That's why he had to die. Almost everyone who has ever read a comic agrees that the greatest recent crossover was World War Hulk, because it started with punching, and then kept punching for each and every issue following. Yes, the conclusion may have disappointed, but that's only because they replaced punching with a deus ex machine laser beam that made the Hulk happy and non-Hulklike or something like that. If it had ended with someone punching the Hulk to death? Comics could've just given up as a medium right there and then; it wouldn't have gotten any better.

So now you know: Promise change, fail to deliver, kill off minor characters, service trademarks and have lots of punching. Follow those simple instructions and one day, you too may be the one person fans pretend could manage to kill Batman.

Marvel & DC - The Summer's Events In A Nutshell [Comic Nerd]