Crossover #3 Review

Writer: Donny Cates / Artist: Geoff Shaw / Image Near the end of last year, we talked about the first issue of Crossover. And specifically, we talked about some of the reservations I had with the story with the persecuted nerd trope and the fictional character discrimination aspect of the story. These were facets of the story that hampered my enjoyment of the premise, which I wish I didn’t honestly. The idea of a cataclysmic event where fictional entities manifest in our reality is so uniquely comic book fan-y. It’s the type of thing that even hinting that Batman and Spider-Man are looking across the hall as a perfectly normal person observes them both can get you really excited.

What keeps drawing me back is Shaw’s absolutely incredible artwork. As noted before, visually this story is stunning. The line work, the character designs, the blended styles that Shaw is able to achieve along the colorist Cunniffee. This book is a masterful demonstrate of color, contrast, and scene. Every panel is a dynamic and contains multitudes of small details that carefully craft such wonderful scaffolding for Cates’s writing. And I think my problem is that Cates’s writing fluxes a little too over the place for me personally. Crossover #3 starts with a thinly veiled allusion to Watchmen and how the book’s ending was ultimately flawed because if something world breaking actually happened, we’d just have even more conflict. And the thing is, we have seen this to be the case in the two differ…