Reborn
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.
As a fan, I have to say, it has almost no impact on whether or not I buy the book. I had ordered 600 but canceled my order this morning, after coming to my senses and realizing I read Cap in trade and don’t need a random issue floating around and taking up space in my short boxes (and lightening my wallet).
As a marketer/PR guy and armchair consultant, I’m most mystified by the whole Monday release thing. I can understand wanting to time out the release of the comic so that it comes out as close to the story as possible, but why did the story have to come out today? Couldn’t the Daily News have waited until Wednesday to publish?
Considering that little blip was a big source of a lot of the frustration from retailers–that Marvel changed up the release dates on them and didn’t give them nearly enough reasonable time to respond to the change–you would think Marvel might have pushed a bit harder in negotiating for an exclusive that would actually hit stands the day the comic hit stores. Plus, if you’re trying to lure people into shops, why not do it on a Wednesday when there’s lots of other exciting new product to push in their direction?
Given all that, I wonder if this didn’t go slightly awry at some point during the process–Marvel gets word that it’ll be running on Monday and not much they can do about it, so they scramble to correct it on their end with the early release.
Sorry, a few other things…
1) I honestly think anyone really worrying about “spoilers” when things like this happen (big coverage of a major storyline in a national news source) needs to just get used to it. If it’s really important to them, they can avoid the internet for a day and find a shop selling 600 today. Otherwise, just accept the big vague spoiler and live with it.
2) For Marvel–and shit, for comics as a whole, or geekdom as a whole–I can’t see any downside or negative on this. The retail thing was a bit of a screw-up and I totally agree that steps need to be taken to figure out how to best communicate with and support the retail community when these things happen.
Otherwise, you’ve got a big paper doing a nice story on a major storyline that just happens to be tangentially related to a big summer movie coming up in a few years–even if there’s not a rush of sales at stores and new comics fans, it’s a big win. There’s a bigger game being played here and Marvel’s winning big-time (although DC got a nice coup with that news about Superman from Wednesday Comics running in USA Today).
Superman from Wednesday Comics running once in the print version of USA Today and then appearing online only in subsequent installments. But I’m splitting hairs.
The thing that strikes me as a fail with the announcement today is not that it happened or that the Monday release is going down, but that the newspaper fails to cite that the story hook they’re talking about gets moving in a milestone issue that is in stores today, their attention focused solely on next month’s Reborn mini launching.
I have to agree with Matt that I only saw the spoiler because I was asking for it; I’d never see the Daily News under ordinary circumstances, and the same venues that linked me to it had stories over the past week that the spoiler was coming. I could have avoided it.
And maybe Monday tested better on the news cycle to get the hype going for Wednesday? God knows. I just know MY shop didn’t get the book today and they may be bugged by people trying to buy it, but I guess that was their own choice.
I can see both sides of this coin.
I get Marvel wanting the attention and coverage, but to me, it feels like a bait and switch. A new release date for a book naturally made a lot of people assume that something was happening in THAT BOOK. Then it turned out that that wasnt the big news.
For me, i found out about Reborn at 7am when it was tweeted by creators / staff, and I assumed that this was spoiling the book – and i was very surprised.
I am not invested in Captain America, and I am Canadian, so i dont see the USA Today or whatever newspapers are talking about it, and i didnt expect to find the info out 5 hrs before stores open. Again — not that i really am invested, but i was curious enough to perhaps take a walk to the store at lunch.
It is hard to tell what you can, and cant talk about as a fan.
I assumed that the Reborn news was the 600 book news. Was even more confused when it wasnt!
I still havent seen the news from any other source than Twitter.
Summary: not mad, but confused! 🙂
to be clear: the news wasnt linked to or anything, but spelled out in 140 characters or less 😉
As a reader, I could be upset that they “spoiled” Steve Roger’s return, but honestly who didn’t see this coming? The announcement of an announcement about Captain America was the real spoiler. And to be fair, they didn’t spoil how it happens or what it will actually mean for Captain America.
from a Marketing standpoint, the Daily News story fumbled the announcement. It didn’t mention #600 was moved up for release today and that the Reborn story spins out of siad issue. So now the mainstream audience doesn’t know to rush out to stores and buy a copy — which seems like part of the point of releasing the book early.
The other aspect of it was to develop buzz a la Apple and their big release hullabaloo. But like Apple should know, you have to announce something MORE than what people to expect you too, or else it doesn’t give you the buzz and bump you want (stock price).
So basically, the announcement is probably meaningless to most readers/fans, and it was executed poorly from a marketing standpoint. (But not SOCIAL Media Marketing.)
I guess my response to all is that I wonder if it was designed specifically to promote Cap 600, in the way that the previous story on his death was designed to specifically promote Cap 25, or if they wanted to get some coverage about Cap returning and because of release dates/storylines, they basically had to strike this awkward balance of “do news story now, before storyline starts/start storyline in Cap 600, released on Monday/Steve Rogers returns in Reborn 1 in July.” I think that’s because with the story starting in today’s issue, it’s not really breaking news in two weeks when Reborn starts, but you can’t really pimp today’s issue that hard as “the return of Steve Rogers” because it’s not; it’s where the return begins, I guess?
You also can’t discount the extent to which a journalist will conduct interviews and receive information and then write a story that totally misinterprets and twists the information to whatever end they want. It’s possible Marvel offered and delivered a story on Cap 600, and what they got back was a story on Cap coming back in two weeks, with nary a mention of 600. Not much you can do about that.
I think fans are misjudging the story based on whether it will get people into comic shops this week and buying 600, when in reality, it’s more of a news piece on upcoming events in comics that happen to start in Cap 600, and it was released early to avoid fans bitching too heartily about “OMG SPOILERZ.”
Trevor: you’re right – from a social perspective, they’ve generated a ton of conversation (and good or bad conversation is irrelevant).
Regarding the spoiler aspect of it: I’m not making the argument that I’m angry about the spoilage. It is part of the culture, no matter what Peter David says, and it would happen even without an internet to support it. If I called Matt and asked him to tell me what happened in Batman last week, he’d go ahead and do it and not respect my spoiler safety. I just bring it up because the publisher is spoiling its own content and I’m not railing against it, just interested in what benefit they get from doing so.
@Jeff – i didnt interpret your post as people being mad about the spoilor aspect of it either, just trying to clarify expectation (that Cap 600 had a huge announcement, and that said announcement was that Steve was/was not coming back and that that announcement wouldnt happen until the comic was at least on sale) and what actually happened (Cap 600 is coming out but THAT ISNT THE STORY, ZOMG REBORN IS COMING OUT HOLY CRAP!) etc.
When i saw the Reborn news, i misconstrued the news as what was happening in Cap 600.
I saw a comment elsewhere — don’t know if it’s true, but it’s an interesting wrinkle — that getting books in on Monday costs more because of weekend shipping. So stores may have foregone the option, figuring they’d sell out their stock anyway and not have to pay the extra shipping. I’d guess a store that gets more casual/walk-in fans might be more likely to want the early book? Still, I don’t see how this is going to get the hype that the *death* did — some cable news outlet saw that as a way to tap into the zeitgeist, ditto the Obama story. I’m hard pressed to see this having a similar resonance.
The marketing of this particular story-line in Captain America does irk me, especially since it does kind of seem to give Bucky the shaft right as he was starting to be accepted as the new Cap. That said, Brubaker’s managed to spin gold out of some shit editorial edicts before, so I’m going to keep trusting him until he falls down a well.
I will be swinging by my shop tonight to grab the book, and I do feel bad that they opted in to the Monday shipping for this book. They got burned by the whole Cap #25 mess and didn’t want to get flat footed again. The rate at which Marvel jerks around their retailers (their actual customers, mind you) is just amazing.
Can’t blame Marvel for even trying to pump sales into a single issue, even if it won’t sustain over the course of the series.
But I figure this is more the opening salvo in what will surely be a two-year promotional campaign to drive the non-geek masses into theatres for “The First Avenger.”
Either way, I have been enjoying “Captain America” the series, but it has been somewhat drawn out and one-note. Bucky will never be Cap to me, and from a personal standpoint, I would love to see a Steve Rogers Cap series I can love, which I haven’t really since the back-to-back Stern/Gruenwald runs in the 1980s.