Videos by ComicBook.com
Tie-in comics can be pretty cool, but Marvel has made them into the most annoying part of their events. They stuff as many tie-ins into all of them as they can, with some mattering and some just acting as advertising for the main story. These ten Marvel events had way too many tie-ins, running the gamut of quality.
10) Avengers vs. X-Men
Avengers vs. X-Men is better than you remember, but it definitely over did it with the tie-ins. The 12-issue series was long enough, but it had tie-ins in every major X-Men and Avengers book, numerous solo books, and several miniseries. Some of them are fun, like AvX, Uncanny X-Men, and Wolverine and the X-Men, but most of the rest of them were just cash grabs. This story came out in 2012, when Marvel thought that MCU fans would run to comic stories, so putting “Avengers” on the covers of every book possible was their way of marketing to them (and they never actually showed up in any numbers; down with MCU synergy!).
9) “Fall of X”
X-Men fans loved the Krakoa Era, but once Jonathan Hickman left the books, sales started to fall precipitously. “Fall of X” was the end of the era and it ran through every X-book of the time. It was kicked off with four Before the Fall one shots, ran through every ongoing title, and had numerous miniseries. However, the problem came in that the miniseries of the first six months didn’t build up anything in the last six, so you could skip most of them and not lose anything. What made it worse is that Marvel cut six months off the story, which originally supposed to run for close to 18 months, meaning that everything in the last six months felt rushed and badly fleshed out. While it has some bright spots, pretty much just anything written by Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing, and Ben Percy, the rest of it is mostly bad.
8) “Age of Revelation”
After the Krakoa Era, the X-Men books didn’t get much better (other than Uncanny X-Men), and the “From the Ashes” status quo proved to be a minor disaster, especially the story that ended it: “Age of Revelation”. This book took readers ten years into the future after Doug Ramsey turned Apocalypse heir Revelation took over the world. There were two bookend issues and 17 three-issue miniseries, and you basically only needed to read the bookends and the comics written by Jed MacKay. The story was meant to take advantage of the 30th anniversary of “Age of Apocalypse”, but it failed completely, and its lack of quality hurt the already ailing X-Men line.
7) Secret Wars
Secret Wars was the culmination of Jonathan Hickman’s amazing Avengers run, with Doctor Doom recreating the multiverse in his image, and the heroes and villains of Earth-616 and Earth-1610 trying to break his grasp over creation. This story had a lot of miniseries taking place in various alternate universes based on older stories, and the vast, vast majority of them had nothing to do with the main story. Some of them were good, but you could skip all of them and not miss anything.
6) House of M
House of M was hot garbage, a story that basically served to push the X-Men further from the center of the Marvel Universe. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver recreated the world so that mutants were the dominant race, and basically every book in Marvel’s 2005 publishing line had a tie-in, as well as there being several tie-in miniseries. This was the second event of their ’00s event cycle, so they hadn’t went as crazy with the tie-ins as they would in the future, but there was still way too many. It honestly wasn’t all that interesting of an alternate universe, and the only ones that were worth reading was the Spider-Man and Iron Man miniseries, the Wolverine (Vol. 3) issues, and the Captain America (Vol. 5) issue.
