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Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Snark-a-palooza!
I actually did mean to add Absorbascon to my side-bar last night...in all the reconfiguring madness I left it off.
I've got this horrible suspicion that we're going to be left holding a lot of unsold House of M tie-ins. People actually seem to be interested in DC's upcoming crossover, at least partly because the way they're approaching it feels more satisfying as a reader. Marvel is just dumping a bunch of minis and one-shots on the public, and interrupting storylines on lower selling titles, to create a massive number of books to dump on retailers. And tellingly, no one except the most die-hard Avengers and X-Men fans are asking us to reserve copies of this series for them, while we're still getting lots of requests from people to hold all the Infinite Crisis build-up titles for them.
So, anyway, yeah, of course Wolverine is the star of the cross-over, and the "you will like this character", "most important character in the Marvel Universe" character is going to be a teenage girl...
Okay, hands up those of you who are actually surprised that Marvel is teasing the possibility of the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Marvel Universe crossing over in Ultimate Fantastic Four...let's see, that's precisely none of you. About what I thought.
Anyone want to take bets on the likelihood of Combat Zone even coming out as a graphic novel?
The new "Mythos" line from Marvel is going to present "all new" origins for the characters that blend the traditional comic origins with the movie origins. On the assumption that people will go see the movies and then rush out to comic shops to buy a comic featuring a version of that character that is neither the film nor the comic version. Uh, yeah...
Nevermind that the usual pattern we see with films feeding interest in the comics is that all our sales occur up to the release of the movie and rapidly diminish after the movie comes out. We saw that pattern most recently with Sin City and Constantine/Hellblazer.
On that note, it's worth pointing out that we're doing brisk business with Batman trades at the moment, but we can't friggin' give any Fantastic Four comics away.
I spotted this over at The Beat: Apparently in the upcoming film Forty Year Old Virgin, they're presenting the main character as a comic book collector.
Cue the bitching about "dated stereotypes" and "giving comic fans a bad name." Maybe someone could start an interweb petition to get them to change that plot point...
While poking around that site, I also found some set photos from V for Vendetta and immediately cringed. Yeah, as if that unconfirmed rumor about England turning fascist because Nazis invaded wasn't clue enough, those photos pretty much confirm my fears that the people making the movie were going to misunderstand the source material.
The whole point of the Voice is that he's anonymous. As far as the public is concerned he literally is the Voice of Fate. To turn him into a celebrity newsreader, with his name and face plastered all over the place...it just reeks of a sad attempt to "contemporize" the material.
(And it's my annoyance over things like this that make me feel slightly guilty for making fun of the people who are going to be offended by things like Forty Year Old Virgin...)