Yesterday, Marvel made a big hubbub by sending out the following press release to the world:
In an effort to provide assistance to comic retailers in 2010, Marvel is offering retailers an opportunity to turn unsold comics into an extremely rare Siege #3 Deadpool Variant!
Retailers – for every 50 stripped covers of the following comics sent to Marvel, you will qualify to receive one FREE Siege #3 Deadpool Variant. The 50 stripped covers can be any combination of the comics listed below and all submissions need to be received at the Marvel office at the address below by Tuesday 2/16/2010. Also included with the stripped covers must be your store contact information including Diamond Account # and email address.
Stripped Covers To Be Sent:Adventure Comics #4
Booster Gold #26Doom Patrol #4
Justice League Of America #39Outsiders #24.
R.E.B.E.L.S #10
Address To Send Submission:
James NausedasMarvel Entertainment, LLC417 Fifth Avenue, 10th FloorNew York, NY 10016
All the directions above must be adhered to in order to receive the free Siege #3 Deadpool Variants and the submissions must be received by Tuesday 2/16/2010 in order to qualify.
Please note that this is not a Diamond-affiliated promotion and Diamond should not be contacted. Retailers will be contacted via email once Marvel receives the submissions. Retailer with further questions should contact helpme@marvel.com.When this information first hit yesterday, I went out of my way not to comment on it, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, in these days of all information ever being available online all the time accessible by everyone is not something I approve of, and I have commented on this again and again. I guess I'm the only one that thinks this type of PR is not for consumption by the general public. Why do my customers need to know this information? They don't, and there are many instances where this kind of information gets distributed globally. Why should I care? And if Marvel did send out an email to retailers only, I'm sure there are many retailers out there that would immediately post this info for the world to see, on their Facebook pages, as a Tweet, or Blog about it. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see this PR go out to all the news sites etc., and I'm not, but it is frustrating to have all information about my business out there for the world to see. To be quite frank I can't understand why all fanboys and girls feel the need to know all of this type of thing, they don't own/operate a shop, etc. So anyway, this is one of the main reasons I did NOT comment on this before, but now there is this great "Hitler on the Marvel Variant News" Youtube video that I DO now feel the need to share because it's way too funny for words.
Go. Watch this and enjoy. Warning, this video is not intended for any underage viewers due to the language content.
Looking at offical PR (above) it seems like a pretty shitty move on Marvel's part to slap DC so hard and in such a public fashion. It has been pointed out on numerous comic news sites and comic message boards that DC has been dominating the online comic news of late, but really is that any reason to do this? If they REALLY wanted to help the retailers out, like they say they do in the PR, they would offer us returns on any number of crap Marvel books. Like Brian Hibbs pointed out, why not make the Captain America Reborn stuff returnable? We are all pretty much choking on those, and the Dark Reign shit too, again like Hibbs pointed out. But instead of doing something much more productive and helpful to the retailers, they offer to take about $200 (retail) worth of comics for ONE Siege #3 Deadpool variant. Really? Wow, thanks Marvel, that's just awesome! I suppose there are people out there willing to spend A LOT on this variant, but I would have to sell that one book for AT LEAST $100.00 or a little more to make it worth my while. I was a little shocked to see this PR yesterday, I have to admit. This is a new low for Marvel. Will I send a bunch of the ring books in for one of these ULTRA rare variants? Maybe, I haven't decided for sure yet, but why didn't Marvel offer this sort of deal for returns of their own damn books, that's what I want to know. I suppose if they did, Marvel couldn't have stolen DC's crazy announcement after announcement online thunder, but really was this necessary?
Hitler is mad and so am I. I may not be yelling and screaming as loudly as Hitler in the video, but I can understand his frustration. I just don't want this whole episode to escalate into any kind of pissing match between the Big Two. Why can't we all just get along? Silly question, I know, we are talking about comics here, and we are a medium traditionally steeped in rivalries, but still....
What I find the most staggering is all the ways in which people are trying to spin the positives out of this rather than actually trying to discern what the point of it all is.
ReplyDeleteIt just astonishes me how some are trying to say there's nothing wrong going on here, and that the ultimate effect of all this will be if the retailers participate.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't participate. In the end, you're right. I really didn't need to know this was happening, but because it's the internet we're going to learn about it whether we want to or not.
The discourse between the fans on the sites, what they're actually saying to one another and how they're getting to those conclusions, is the thing I find so interesting. It's like a wierd attempt for the internet to instantly spin it, either positive or negative, rather than try to determine just what it is Marvel is trying to do here.