What the fuck happened?

All the HydraCap Keikaku leading up to this was amazing. Secret Empire was set to be the best Marvel event but it's fucking trash.

What went wrong?

No modern event can live up to it's hype.

Events are always bad.

They're heavily fucked with by editorial and executives and have to be tailored to sell tie-ins.

Not enough Carol. Hopefully she gets more spotlight as it goes on.

Time skips always destroy the momentum.

It's a Marvel event they're always fucking awful. Even the main story for Hickman's Secret Wars was shit, only good part was the side stories.

Every event falls apart at about the 2/3 mark. They have to find a way to hand wave the ending so the status quo can continue.

>Ulysses just goes and fucks off with Eternity for literally no reason
>Everyone punching each other in Central Park solves all the problems of Civil War
>We found all the heroes the skrulls were impersonating, now we can easily find and kill them all!

Forgive me for not posting DC events, I'm a pleb and only watch their cartoons.

This is why I have not read any of SE. There was just no point in turning it into a big event from the start. It should have had a small finale crossover to mirror Standoff. Bringing in all these fucking characters the readers have no reason to give a shit about was a fucking horrible idea.

Nick Spencer is a hack, and I know how you're going to respond
>b-but Superior Foes! b-but The Fix!
you know what those two have in common? Steve Lieber.
>b-but Steve Rogers: Captain America is good!
no, it's not. It follows the same pattern as Secret Empire, with the same ridiculous plot contrivances to make Steve not seem like a bad guy, while still allowing him to achieve his goals. There was not some radical shift in writing quality from not-event to event. It was always bad. You are only now just realizing it because the event is just dialing the problems up to 11.

there was a timeskip? how long?

>you know what those two have in common? Steve Lieber.
Bedlam didn't have Steve Lieber and was pretty enjoyable.

I heard the same thing about Morning Glories and that was crap.

DC quit doing those kind of gimmick events in the early 2000's.

They brought it back with Futures End, Zero Year and Forever Evil but quit after that.

Their crossovers now are contained within book lines and are just regular summer blockbuster kind of shit where everyone fights something, see Night of the Monster Men and JL vs. SS.

Champions and Carol arare key elements of how this event is supposed to be resolved.

How can that not have a shit result?

>>Ulysses just goes and fucks off with Eternity for literally no reason

I was amazed Bendis actually did the "I must return to my home planet" move from the Poochie episode.

>stopped in the early 2000s
>what is Infinite Crisis
>what is Final Crisis
>what is Blackest Night
>what is Flashpoint
they really did tone it down after New 52, though. Futures End was just a bunch of one shots and the event mini, Forever Evil was the only true mega-crossover event of that era.

Carol's absense is Secret Empire's biggest strength.

>They brought it back with Futures End, Zero Year and Forever Evil but quit after that.

None of those were big events. They had some gimmick one-shots but they didn't have the event influencing ongoings. Blackest Night was basically the last one for DC, unless you count Flashpoint/new 52 or Rebirth but relaunches feel a little different to me than events.

The Snyder event might have traditional tie-ins and shit though.

Convergence gets a pass because DC moved their offices cross-country during it, right?

and it was only like 2 months
and no one really remembers it

I'm not talking about events like that, I mean GIMMICK events that are like "what if ____?! wouldnt that be crazy?!?!?!" and all the tie-ins are variations on that theme (Original Sin, Fear Itself, JLApe, Pulp Heroes, etc) though I forgot about Blackest Night, which definitely counts.

I'm not sure if I'd count ones like Flashpoint and Convergence because they literally paused the entire line and all the tie-ins were completely different series with different creative teams.

I'd still count Forever Evil though it wasn't as big a deal as Blackest Night. The tie-ins were more like gimmick ones instead of the "here's what [x] was doing during this event!" like the ones for Blackest Night, Infinite Crisis, and so on.

They didn't pause the entire line during Flashpoint.

Final Crisis was "what if Darkseid won?"

>you know what those two have in common? Steve Lieber.
Yeah, all you need to do is look at Ant Man to see that all the visual gags that made Superior Foes great were 100% Lieber.

you get it, my guy

Didn't they cancel everything when Flashpoint started?

Honestly I started reading DC with the New 52, so my memories of those events were just from reading people bitch on Sup Forums at the time.

2008-2011 DC was kind of trash so I haven't read a lot from that era.

>Didn't they cancel everything when Flashpoint started?

They didn't. The books still continued on all the way to the final Flashpoint issue in August. They would've lost a lot more sales if they had canceled everything in favor of just the Flashpoint minis and tie-ins.

Convergence was just an exception because they needed to move DC from east to west coast and there wouldn't be time to manage all the regular comics. Putting the comics on hold ended up being a mistake because it hit their sales hard.

two things happened
1) They made it perfectly clear that this is a alternate universe or the events will be wiped away at the end by blowing up Las Vegas, that's the type of destruction and body count that would be massive black cloud over the heads of any of the Hydra heroes going forward, like M-Day and Scarlet Witch.
2) despite everything, they're still not going to let Captain America lose, they created a 2nd Captain America just to beat the evil one.

pretty sure the Hulk destroying Las Vegas is still 100% canon

Wait, has this already hit the 2/3 mark? Didn't it literally just launch last month?

I don't know what that other user is talking about. Marvel events tend to fall apart right off the bat
But, yes. SE is only issue 3, I think.

it's at #3, which is actually #4 because there was a #0, and we're going all the way to #10

Ulysses is probably going to appear in ultimates 2 with whatever the first firmament has planned

I'd say combination of Spencer dividing the story between about 4 different groups causing it to go even slower than it needs to and that he seems to substitute shock value each issue for actual storytelling

>What went wrong?

Well for one thing, Nick Spencer

I actually do like the worldbuilding, but it's kind of pointless since the whole thing is is only eight issues, and the plot is pretty lame.

>they didn't have the event influencing ongoings
Forever Evil did

>8 issues
11

All events are cannibalized from existing runs, so they always consist of:

> - Stuff that was supposed to be the climax of the writer's story
plus
> - Stuff editorial forced him to put in so they could have BIG CHANGES and SHOCK FINAL PAGES.

AxiS was a famous example. Rick Remender teased for years that he was going to have Red Skull become the new Onslaught in Uncanny Avengers. Then that story was cannibalized for an event, but it wasn't big enough for an event, so they added in "what if the good guys became bad guys and the bad guys became good?" and "could you retcon in that Magneto isn't really the father of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver?" and the end result just buried the original story under a pile of pointless shit.

The one good thing about the original Civil War is that it was actually pitched as an event, not an outgrowth of some other run, so it actually had a premise that made some internal sense.

>BIG CHANGES and SHOCK FINAL PAGES.
you say that like it's not all Spencer, since that stuff is straight out of his Captain America runs, especially Steve's

When has a MarLel event ever been good?

Seriously, I want to know.

While I'm a Wandafag and therefore hate House of M, it was a pretty well done event. The premise was simple, the cast was kept small (it was basically just the casts of New Avengers and Astonishing X-Men) the art was very good and the big SHOCK TWIST actually did change the status quo in a major way.

I wish it had never been done but it was done better than most of the events that followed it.

It skipped a lot of the takeover.

It should have took maybe 3 issues for Cap to take power, 1 issue to show the effects of his rule/the heroes making a plan, 2 for the heroes putting the plan into action (save most of the collecting cube fragments for tie-ins) and 1 issue for the final battle.

Don't forget Infinity from Hickman's Avengers

Bedlam was fucking awesome. He needs to go back to that instead.

-The event lacks a central protagonist. Cap is the antagonist but FalCap really should have been the protagonist. Past events had central protagonists, even if said protagonists were a group of people(Avengers, X-Men, etc). You can't really say the Champions are the protagonists in Secret Empire since they're just a random group of people who pop in and out the story.

-The appeal of Secret Empire was supposed to be watching Cap build his empire and take over the world. The fucking timeskip just skipped the most interesting part and now we're stuck with a "topple the king" story. How did he make the US population submit to his will? We dont fucking know.

-Characters acting out of character. Frank would never join Hydra.

-SE existing in it's own bubble. Kinda hard to have stakes when all the other fucking books are going on like normal and ignoring it.

-Spencer is too afraid to make Cap the bad guy. HydraCap was doing a bunch of heinous shit for the last couple months but now he's afraid to blow up Las Vegas?

>-Spencer is too afraid to make Cap the bad guy. HydraCap was doing a bunch of heinous shit for the last couple months but now he's afraid to blow up Las Vegas?
this is true of Captain America before Secret Empire, too. He went to go kill Jack Flag in a coma but was saved by narrative contrivance.

That's a problem with building an event around an internationally famous, valuable character. Even if it's all going to be wiped away they can never get clearance to make him do anything truly evil on-panel.

In the '00s they could have characters like Scarlet Witch and even Iron Man be completely shat on because they weren't very valuable properties. It took them years to un-break them but at least the events weren't completely bland.