My favorite crossover/big event comic of all time is The Death and Return of Superman. For one thing, it actually significantly, satisfyingly delivers on what it promises. It also had enough room to breathe in its storytelling that the big and small moments of tragedy, sadness, and sometimes even sheer ridiculousness, could land with the weight they deserved, so they felt real.
It wasn’t, though, until I read an anniversary retrospective essay by Dan Jurgens that I realized another aspect of what made that story special to me, something I should’ve understood and had the language to express long before. He mentioned that he, and all the other creators working on Superman books leading up to the big event, had been able to grow the cast of characters in Metropolis such that these regular people – who would ordinarily have been relegated to just shouting, “Look, up in the sky!” in a different era – felt Superman’s death, and wept at the destruction of the city, just as keenly as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Lex Luthor did.
Marvel comics can, historically, be good at getting the person in the street caught up in superpowered hijinks, too. Marvels, of course, and pick pretty much any issue of Spider-Man. Mark Gruenwald’s run writing Captain America, I appreciate for how it took the time for Cap to see how regular people tried to live in a world where the Red Skull could threaten to blow up their town, at any time. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just what I noticed looking over at my shelves of comic books while I write the text to accompany this comic. To see what I see, look here:
Because I enjoy the presence of “regular people” characters so much in the comics I love, I tried to incorporate them into my own work, whenever possible. For a lot of the early going of the stories in the Phil Wrede Marvel Action Figure Comic Universe, that was limited to J. Jonah Jameson (who isn’t exactly an Average Joe, despite what he might tell you), but as I found the right figures to build out the cast, we start to see them, more and more..
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