One of the things I discovered long ago is that while there is fun in attribution the tag of “guilty pleasure” to things, I never really feel guilty for getting into something and enjoying it. It’s why my tastes range all over the map and I’ll try almost anything once. With comic books, there are series where yes, they’re a bit light and fluffy and not all that material, but to call them a guilty pleasure does them a bit of a disservice. If there’s anything that I might call a guilty pleasure, it’s the event series that happen. I manage to avoid them for the most part these days, largely because they are so sprawling and all over the map. But we’re also seeing more micro-events going on, which can trick you and sucker you in. That’s creative and I appreciate that, though I may get frustrated when I do get sucked in.
The event series origin was something that, back in the day, was both humble and bold and has to some degree been lost over the decades. In the 80’s, when you had such line-shaping material as Crisis on Infinite Earths, you couldn’t call that a guilty pleasure. George Perez illustrating the combination and destruction of an impossible number of worlds and characters? That was must-see material. Similarly, Secret Wars from Marvel Comics worked its own event series magic with some tie-ins here and there and some changes that occurred because of events in the series. Rereading that recently, I couldn’t help but to be struck by how quaint a lot of it felt, both in style and characterization, but also that it was so easily accessible you could see why people would try so many books.
We shall not talk of Secret Wars 2 and the deluge of tie-in books that made me shake my fists twice-weekly upon entering my local comic shop back in the day.
So while I can’t pick a particular series, I do admit that a lot of event series are like trainwrecks I can’t pull away from looking at. They may have good core ideas to work with, but I know in the end that they’re largely big marketing ploys to expose people to more books, launch new books and to draw attention all around. It’s smart, in smaller doses, but they’re the closest things that I’ll feel guilty about reading and buying since it feeds the machine of more.