Darkseid Minus New Gods=GENIUS
Jun 17So I posted this over at my relatively new Tumblr site (check it out, won’t you?) but it deserves to be shouted from the highest of mountaintops.
It’s Darkseid Minus New Gods, from Gavok over at the excellent 4thletter! and it is heavy with comic brilliance. Go there now.
Reborn II: Electric Boogaloo
Jun 15Okay, so I’m trying to tweet out my heart about this whole Cap600 thing, and it’s not working so good, so at the risk of being dumb and forcing two blog posts about one topic onto our gentle readership, I’m gonna spew for a minute here, if only to try and get my thoughts down clearly.
Reborn
Jun 15There’s a lot of news happening right now. While God knows what is going on in Iran, while a new iPhone is tantalizing the gadget-savvy, while the economy continues to do whatever it is it’s doing at this exact moment, and while Matt cradles himself against the weight of Orlando’s crushing defeat at the hands of the Lakers, Marvel has managed to garner more MSM coverage that 1) spoiled its entire fanbase before comic shops even open, 2) fails to mention that the shocking event kicks off in a book that is available in stores today and 3) pulls the rug out from underneath a certain returning character’s well-received replacement, who has been kept insulated from the rest of the publisher’s shared universe until about six months ago.
Every time that Marvel pitches a story like this to the press, I wonder about the quantifiable long term gain they expect/realize in terms of new or returning readers. Are there people out there who have never read a comic book or who have abandoned them in the ether of nostalgia only to come back to the fold based on a story in the NY Daily News? Someone is running numbers over there, which is how they’ve calculated that this is going to be “Civil War #1” big instead of “J. Jonah Jameson is the mayor” big. Do these people exist? From the retailers that I know, the answer seems to be, “No.” Some shops see a run on the issues from the investicomics set, yes, but I’m not sold that Marvel is creating new customers by doing this (while doing something of a disservice to the existing fanbase in sacrifice to this goal).
I’m not talking about the content of the story itself, which I’m actually anticipating, but solely the PR/marketing rationale behind it. Given that your friendly neighborhood Alert Nerds work in PR/Marketing/Journalism when we’re not nerding out here, it’s only natural that we would. I’d be interested to see the sales figures on the individual issues that have gotten press attention over the past few years – with the exception of the Obama appearance in Amazing Spider-Man, I’m predicting a trend of diminishing returns.
If you’re a fan, I’d love to hear how this type of promotion affects your buying habits and your enjoyment of the book. If you’re a retailer, I’d love to hear about how you’ll be adjusting your orders/how many new faces came through your door today. And finally, if you’re Jim McCann or someone else in Marvel’s mighty marketing arm, I’d love to pick your brain about the strategy behind this.
Stuff We Like This Week: June 12 Edition
Jun 12
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
6 Hours in San Francisco
Jun 10Through a series of unfortunate events, I will be traveling for business in late June…land Sunday evening in Seattle, fly Tuesday morning to San Francisco, drive to Chico, leave Chico on Wednesday back to San Francisco, take this horrifying red-eye time-shift thing from SF back to Orlando, with a two-hour layover in fucking DETROIT.
The trip’s only redeeming factor is that because I planned it based on an incomplete knowledge of events, I should find myself with about 6 hours to kill in San Francisco on July 1.
I will use this time to visit what are arguably two of the finest comic book stores on the planet: Comix Experience and Isotope. I will meet two of the interweb’s leading comics bon vivants: Brian Hibbs and James Sime. And with luck, I will break bread with a few bloggers I’ve long idolized, hoping to overcome the initial awkwardness of meeting web pals IRL quickly and without too much alcohol, so that we can have some engaging conversation and I won’t drive my rental car into a street light between the restaurant and the airport.
Should be fun…barring last-minute disaster or the shifting sands upon which business travel plans are always built, it should actually happen. I’ll livetweet the living shit out of it. Don’t you worry.
