Oh, Marvel_B0y! You cad.
Oh, Marvel_B0y! You cad.
Mar 25I sorta glanced half-heartedly over at the whole Marvel_B0y blog controversy as it unfolded over the past few days. I saw that the LiveJournal had been taken down thanks to the mention in Lying in the Gutters, and I noted there were some potentially explosive spoilers in the comments of the dead journal, and I wished I’d not missed them, but I pretty much moved on.
Then this morning, I see Marvel_B0y has returned. So have the spoilers.
There are possible spoilers at those links for Marvel’s upcoming storylines, and I may even get into them below, so please do not click anyplace up in here if you don’t wanna be spoiled. Here endeth the warning.
Then again, I don’t know how much I even need to discuss the spoilers. They’re up there, if you wanna read them, at least for now. They sure seem plausible enough, but they also seem plausible enough to be fake.
I’m not recalling 100% but I seem to remember Bendis being a big fan of the revived Battlestar Galactica over on Sci-Fi…if so, it’s clear he’s ripping off some pages from the Cylon playbook for the Skrulls. At least, I hope he is; if the bits about seventies heroes returning (like Luke Cage and Ms. Marvel) are at all true, it will be a more interesting story if the current characters in the modern Marvel Universe are Skrull sleeper agents who don’t even know they’re Skrulls, instead of malevolent manipulators who will be revealed with a mustache-twirling gloat at some point.
At any rate, what’s fascinating here is the blog itself, and what it is.
If it’s real, and there is a mole within Marvel…WOW. That is a marketing nightmare of the highest proportions. I have to wonder to what extent it would affect the storytelling–will they make wholesale changes just to avoid these now-spoiled plot points, in the manner of DC and its Armageddon 2001 backpedal that took a so-so crossover and pissed all over it.
But it isn’t real. It’s a fake. There’s almost no question in my mind. Why, you ask? I’ll tell you.
1) Sure, there’s been SOME apparent strum und drang regarding Marvel_B0y’s actions, but wouldn’t you almost expect MORE? Where is Bendis in all this–wouldn’t he be spewing all over the internet about how the spoilers were fakes, even if they were real, just to protect the story? Tom Brevoort’s got a blog–why isn’t he spewing too?
2) Is the security around these storylines really so lax as to permit this level of reveal? Bigger secrets have been better kept by Marvel staffers, within the past few years at least–it’s hard to believe all these details would suddenly come pouring out just because of one disgruntled employee.
3) Um, wouldn’t they just fire a bunch of low-level people and be done with it? Say, focus heavy on everyone who’s been at the company less than two years, and put hardcore pressure on them to rat each other out, under threat of unemployment and being blacklisted throughout the industry?
4) People who work at comic book companies, at least from what I can tell, aren’t usually just random professionals answering an ad–they tend to be passionate comic book fans who practically hit the jackpot. Why would such a person jeopardize their “dream job” with such a stupid act?
5) Look at your calendar. What’s next Tuesday? That’s right–April 1. The stunt also happens to play perfectly into the thematic underpinnings of Secret Invasion itself–who do you trust, spies within organizations, etc.
If I’m right, and I AM DAMNIT, then many kudos to Marvel. This is kick-ass viral marketing right here. Sure, fanboys will whine about being lied to and the “bond of trust” between Marvel and its readers being broken, but that’s not it at all–they just beat us rabid spoiler junkies and snark merchants at our own game.
Point, Marvel. Well played.
I don’t know if this is real or not, but I disagree with two of your assumptions:
1.) It seems likely to me that Marvel would have told everyone on staff not to comment on this, which is why things have been relatively quiet from their end.
2.) The blogger clearly is (or is at least portrayed as) someone that dreamed of working in comics and has soured on the experience, so it’s not his dream job anymore.
Well, I disagree with your disagreement! 🙂
1) Maybe…but that really doesn’t seem like Marvel’s style. I feel like they’d come out with both guns blazing, and I find it hard to believe they’d be able to shut down a mouth like Bendis if he really got up in arms about something.
2) That could easily be part of the “character.”
My first thought was also “this has got to be fake,” but I admit I hadn’t tied it to Secret Invasion. That’s a great point, and put any doubt to rest for me. It’s viral at its best.
I tend to think that the disgruntled employee is part of the character. The Internet is so predisposed toward hating Joe Q and Bendis et al – and Marvel knows it because they’ve been capitalizing on it everywhere, not just on a fake viral blog.
Hell, I’d wager that if there’s one thing Marvel’s learned over the past year, it’s that hyping a story as bad will also cause it to sell well. That’s the lesson of One More Day, and now that I think of it, it maybe calls the Joe Q/JMS OMD discord into question.
I had that thought around the time of the JMS/Joey Q face off too, Jeff–it seemed a little too convenient.
Just surfing around and re-read an interview with Bendis about New Avengers #31, where he talks about the reveal of Elektra as Skrull–he name-drops Battlestar Galactica, which I thought was interesting…
…and it made me wonder: If that unbelievable reveal was kept pretty tightly under wraps basically until the day the book came out, how would all these leaks have been allowed to happen? The lips are just so tight in the comic book industry, probably because it’s a really small community. Compare that to the film industry, where any 2nd assistant with a decent memory can go home and spoil just about any project with a quick anonymous e-mail to Harry Knowles.