Characters trapped in limbo?
What a fantastic idea for a story!
That concept should grab you by the throat and drag you out of your bed and into your favorite reading spot.
For a few hours, anyway.
CrossGen comics. The result was magical. The kind of creative combustion I’d only seen happen a handful of times in my life, Valiant and Vertigo, also had similar experiences for me. Today I found myself going through some folders filled with amazing art from the Crux series. For those of you who never journeyed to Atlantis, this was a story that began life as a CrossGen comic book which—after CG's collapse—was forgotten. Now the bankruptcy of CrossGen, has been heavily scrutinized since it happened, and hopefully one day, there will be a tell all novel published. As with most bankrupt companies, it happened so fast, and could not have been avoided. I still miss Capricia and Galvan, Tug, Gammid, and all the rest and I never gave up hope that someday they will be rescued from the limbo they're trapped in and start the stories anew.
Well, I’ve had a few days to digest my collection of CrossGen comics. As I said in a previous post, I consider comics to be a very important medium. That said, the CrossGen universe was one of the best I’ve ever been to. For one thing, it's universe was strung together by a common theme, this as many readers know is new to comics. Crisis on Infinite Earths, anyone? Let alone the multiple universes that appear at Marvel on a whim. These days, we’re more likely to talk about a series, discussing the characters, the stories, where we want them to go—but, at the end of the 90's, this was hardly the case. Unless your title was at Valiant or Vertigo, you didn't have to produce a story that would entice the readers, blame Image for this. All you needed was a Liefeld clone, and make sure you had lots of overgrown alien like characters jumping at you, with both hands in the air, screaming about battle. Image ruined the 90's for me. CrossGen created their own league, not as good as Valiant, but close.
Right now I’m rereading Crux, but with hopeful intention, the rest of the line to follow. The past few weeks I’ve been pretty much submerged in the gorgeous landscapes created at CrossGen by Ron Marz, Bart Sears, Mark Waid, Chuck Dixon, and Barbara Kesel to name a few. I point this out not to prove how sharp and contemporary my comic tastes are: it’s actually the opposite. There was once a time when I prided myself on being up on the best new comics out there—subscriber to both Wizard and Hero Illustrated back then, magazines, both dedicated to 100% comics—but those days are long gone. For more than a decade now, I’ve depended on the TV media's uncanny ability to take my stuck-in-the-past tastes and translate them to whatever could be coined, the next summer's blockbuster.
The library of CrossGen titles included:
- Sigil a military science fiction space opera.
- Mystic a magical fantasy fiction.
- The folklore-esque Meridian.
- Scion a King Arthur type adventure series.
- Crossgen Chronicles a series detailing the untold history of the Sigilverse.
- Crux, detailed the exploits of six Atlanteans who were put into stasis and are awoken 100, 000 years later.
- The First, similar to the Marvel's cosmic line, their the Gods of this universe.
- Sojourn, a fantasy tale that involves dragons, trolls, and magic.
- Ruse, Victorian era detective fiction.
- Negation, call it The Great Escape, in space.
- The Path, a samurai epic.
- Brath, a war epic, in the vein of Braveheart.
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