I'm going to get back to writing about these interesting events, especially as they are now making their way into the televisual universes the comics have spawned.
Reading a crossover is sometimes like creating your own novel from pre-existing modules. For example, I'm reading Secret Invasion right now, and I'm including in it all the crossovers that I have. But I don't necessarily have to. I could read just the main series and still get the major events of the story. Add in the Avengers titles, you get a broader, more satisfying story. I would contend that this is the "necessary" reading of this crossover - without both New Avengers and Mighty Avengers, the main story doesn't quite make sense. It's still the same series of events, but more minutely. Add in ancillary titles, in my case the Fantastic Four and Runaways/Young Avengers mini-series, and the story is still broader, though still adhering to a particular chronological scale. I could, of course, choose to leave out the Runaways/Young Avengers book, and read only the "A-List" heroes (thought sometimes the FF slides down to that B-List). If I had more crossovers, I could read the crossover from a street-level perspective, perhaps the She-Hulk crossover, or the Spider-Man one. Or go international and add the Captain Britain title to see what the Skrulls did in the U.K. Each read of it would include different iterations of these events, interacting differently depending on which are mixed with which, telling the same story from a myriad of points of view.
So is this an inflectionary reading? Imagine Secret Invasion, the series, as a framework. It is a series of required moments in a sequence that constitute a basic story. Around this framework, depending on the tie-ins that one chooses, we inflect this framework story with detail - setting, genre, mythicness(?). And the particular inflecting texts we choose also inflect one another. Reading Avengers only turns the story into a Cold War, Tom Clancy-esque action-spy thriller (how's that for a specific genre?). However, the main series and the first three issues of Deadpool would be a very different reading experience. And that foundation would be inflected to become part of the kind of slapstick, meta-storytelling that Deadpool carries with it.
And then suppose we added Captain Britain and MI13? More spy thriller, international vibe, but also inflected by the meta aspect of Deadpool.
Is this fractal comics? Or is it more of a Deleuze and Guattari-ian rhizome? I suppose the entire history of the Marvel Universe is really one large crossover. That would be something to read.
But if we do go with that idea, that the entirety of the publishing history of the Marvel Universe, wherever that beginning point might be, is one prolonged crossover, the shared narrative universe, then inflection starts to bend genre. Allowing that the superhero, embodied by the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, and their ancillary titles to a certain extent, are the baseline, we can inflect the superheroic myth with other generic conventions.
This is something I've been working out in my brain for quite some time. One of the ways I consider my time in grad school is that I was developing a set of concepts and languages with which I could articulate this idea of an inflectionary reading of a shared narrative universe. I think I'll start working it out a bit more over the next few months.
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