Comic Book Resources

Two words: New Guardians. It’s not just the exception to your rule, it’s bad enough to single-handedly negate the goodness of any three series on your list.

(I still love that after the end of the series, the Guardians came back, looked at the New Guardians, and said, “…never mind.”)

Didn’t know SUICIDE SQUAD came out of LEGENDS. That’s cool.

INFINITE CRISIS may yet spawn something great- I haven’t followed the spin-offs out now, but Simone’s ATOM looks promising.

Zero Hour also resulted in the Legion reboot, which lasted until just last year. Like them or not, the post-reboot Legion was around for close to 10 years.

The Byrne reboot of Superman came mostly out of Crisis as well (though slightly delayed).

Knightfall launched Robin and Balent’s Catwoman (which I enjoyed. Shut up!).

While Starman was the only one to launch literally in ZERO MONTH, Impulse, Kyle Rayner’s Green Lantern, the (old) New Legion, and PAD’s Aquaman are all Zero Hour babies (as well as few other titles that will go unmentioned).

Final Night, in a round-about way, launched the latest Green Arrow series, as well as started Hal’s (very long) return to hero-dom (with a stop at Day of Judgement and Infinite Crisis on the way).

Legacy launched Nightwing (and Underworld Unleashed gave him his best villain).

No Man’s Land gave us Batgirl AND Harley Quinn, characters and titles.

Did ANYTHING good come out of Genesis?

Sorry, but I’ve got to correct you on a couple of those, Steven. Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern didn’t come out of ‘Zero Hour’, it came out of ‘Reign of the Supermen’ (’Emerald Twilight’ came about because of the destruction of Coast City at the hands of the Cyborg, and Kyle was already Green Lantern and had been for several months by the time ZH happened). In fact, it’s the other way around; ‘Zero Hour’ told the story of what happened to Hal after ‘Emerald Twilight’, and hence can be considered to spin off out of the Green Lantern story-arc.

Also, PAD’s Aquaman came not out of ‘Zero Hour’, but out of ‘Crisis’ a decade earlier, believe it or not. Just as ‘Man of Steel’ rebooted Superman, and ‘Year One’ rebooted Batman, ‘The Atlantis Chronicles’ was meant to launch a new Aquaman series. But the editor of the new Aquaman series disliked ‘The Atlantis Chronicles’, and so got someone else to write it who didn’t retell Aquaman’s origin. That book was cancelled after a dozen or so issues, and a few years later, they went back to PAD (who’d written ‘Atlantis Chronicles’) to relaunch the series with the “Year One” story he’d been planning all along, ‘Time and Tide’. They sold that as a separate mini-series for marketing reasons, then launched the new Aquaman regular series…about two months before ‘Zero Hour’.

‘Starman’ was not the only title to launch out of “Zero Hour”; ‘Primal Force’, the Jared Stevens ‘Fate’, and ‘Xenobrood’ all launched out of it, and ‘LEGION’ was relaunched as ‘REBELS’. But I’m guessing you knew that, and those were the “unmentioned” titles.

And at the risk of making all this sound like a big ad, the book I’m working on for TwoMorrows Press, ‘The Crossover Companion’, will be listing every spin-off title from every crossover as part of its job as indispensible reference guide to all companywide crossovers.

Haha…no problem, John!

I look forward to reading it! I’m sure there’ll be plenty of good Urban Legend fodder in it! Heck, the PAD Aquaman one was already on the list for an upcoming installment!

Didn’t Bloodlines also lead to Loose Cannon and The Ravers of Superboy and The Ravers!? Best books ever!!

I don’t remember Harley spinning off of NML either…

Her first appearance in the DCU was a Prestige-style one-shot. I don’t remember anything about it or her ongoing related to NML. (But I could be wrong - I just don’t remember)

Nevermind - I just pulled out the HQ GN - I retract. =)

Onslaught/Heroes Reborn gave us the Thunderbolts.

Thunderbolts was going to be introduced no matter what, no?

well, sure, you can say it was going to, but in pure story terms, it was built on the back of HR.

Would Blue Beetle count as an IC spin-off? That’s been a good book so far (wow, three issues of non-suck, what an accomplishment!)

Do non company-wide events count? PAD’s original X-Factor was a spinoff of the Muir Island Saga (as was Jim Lee’s X-Men, though I’m not sure if that’s a plus or a minus), and Exiles could be seen as an outgrowth of Age of Apocalypse, though one much delayed. The Mutant Massacre gave us Excalibur, which introduced a lot of Marvel UK goodness to us American readers…

Avengers Disassambled gave us Brubaker’s Captain America. It also gave us New Avengers, but that isn’t really worse than what was there before (remember Chuck Austen on Avengers ?).

Spider-Man: The Other gave us FNSM.

Phalanx Covenant gave us Generation X.

Actually (God, I’m anal about this) ‘Fall of the Mutants’ gave us ‘Excalibur’. Kitty and Kurt had been recuperating on Muir Isle, yes, but it wasn’t until they found out about the death of the X-Men that they decided to start a new super-team, instead of returning to the X-Men once they’d recovered.

And yes, Bloodlines gave us Loose Cannon, and at least one Raver (Sparx)…it also gave us Anima, the entire Blood Pack, the Psyba-Rats, and Gunfire, the subject of the best gag in DC history. (In Hitman 1000000, someone gained the powers of Gunfire…and died within seconds, after their power to turn anything they touch into an explosive weapon went seriously wrong.)

“‘Starman’ was not the only title to launch out of “Zero Hour”; ‘Primal Force’, the Jared Stevens ‘Fate’, and ‘Xenobrood’ all launched out of it, and ‘LEGION’ was relaunched as ‘REBELS’. But I’m guessing you knew that, and those were the “unmentioned” titles.”

Yes. We were talking about GOOD titles launched by crossovers.

And yes, I know EXACTLY where Kyle came from, but, like Impulse, he was introduced specifically in anticipation of Zero Hour. Heck, his five issue origin story ends with him being recruited by Superman to rally the troops for Zero Hour.

Similarly, while a lot of ground work was laid for Aquaman before, it was Zero Month, where he attached his hook, that really launched the title.

That seems to be PAD’s pattern at DC, start a title (Aquaman, Supergirl, Young Justice) two months BEFORE a major crossover (Zero Hour, Final Night, DC 1,000,000) to get up and running just before getting the crossover sales boost. But he clearly USED the crossover to LAUNCH his titles (just not the first issue).

As yo go re said, all of these titles could have launched whether or not there was a crossover, but they ALL used the crossover to get attention early in their run.

The story I recall reading on Thunderbolts is that it was an old idea Kurt Busiek had for an Avengers storyline that he never expected to be able to write. When Heroes Reborn happened, he realized how well it clicked with his idea to have Baron Zemo masquerade as a superhero, and immediately pitched it to Marvel. Marvel loved it and the wonderfully deceptive PR blitz for Thunderbolts began.

Ah, I remember reading the first issue of Thunderbolts for the first time. Getting to that last page was so freaking awesome….

Sorry, Steven, but I’m still going to have to disagree with you on Green Lantern and Aquaman. By the logic you use, you could say that Zero Hour “launched” Batman, by significantly revising his origin the month after, or that it “launched” Superman, by introducing a brand-new villain and new storyline the month after. (In fact, you could make those arguments more for Superman and Batman than you could for Aquaman–it feels pretty clear, reading issue 0, that PAD just took the story he’d already planned to write for issue #3 and said, “Eh. It’s pretty character-changing, it can pass as a #0,” and went with it. Although I’ve never asked him if that was the case, to be fair.) Tracing the development of the series, the timing appears to be purely coincidental, and certainly not of PAD’s doing. Don’t forget, ‘Time and Tide’ was intended to be the first four issues of the regular series; it was DC’s marketing department that decided to break it off and make it a separate mini-series. Would you still be making this argument if it had been Aquaman #6, instead of #2, that had been released the month before Zero Hour? And let’s not forget that unlike Supergirl, Aquaman actually _didn’t_ cross over into Zero Hour. He had an issue #0, but so did every other title in the DC Universe–it was mandatory that month. But he didn’t actually put in an appearance during the crossover, and so didn’t gain any publicity from it.

And as for GL…Impulse made his first appearance shortly after Zero Hour, in conjunction with a Flash storyline that dealt with the repercussions of Zero Hour. Calling him a “Zero Hour spin-off” makes sense. Kyle made his first appearance shortly before Zero Hour, in conjunction with a Green Lantern storyline that dealt with the repercussions of “Reign of the Supermen”. Calling him a “Zero Hour spin-off”…well, doesn’t.

But hey, Blue Beetle’s been good, right folks?

Nope. Impulse first appeared in the Flash #92, three months BEFORE Zero Hour.
And only two months after Kyle became Green Lantern.

However, both characters are clearly introduced in anticipation of their role in Zero Hour, as was Hal’s transformation into Parallax (unless you believe DC drove Hal mad and gave him godlike power just to get rid of him, and it was only in retrospect that Dan Jurgens said “Oh, I’ve got an idea!”).

By your logic, Blue Beetle DOESN’T count, because it managed to release two issues before Infinite Crisis finished, even if the story ties DIRECTLY into the plot.

“By the logic you use, you could say that Zero Hour “launched” Batman, by significantly revising his origin the month after, or that it “launched” Superman, by introducing a brand-new villain and new storyline the month after. “

Again, I thought we were talking about GOOD stories and characters.