snap judgments

or ‘Surprise! You Already Know! - the Problems with Promoting Three Months Ahead’

What really sunk it in there for me was the most recent cover of Black Panther. Not shown at the Marvel site is the tagline that is set along the bottom of the image which is something to the effect of ‘Who will be the Bride of the Panther?’. Ridiculousness aside, you have to wonder, ‘… who’s the one in the skirt in the shadows?’ Or, what they’d want, ‘which one of those chicks is it going to be?’

Which would be a fine question and certainly would sell a few curious issues… if IT WASN’T SUCH A MEDIA BLITZ MONTHS AGO! If next to that cover, our store hadn’t put the little ‘faux invitations’ Marvel had sent us to the ‘Wedding of the Century’ with Storm and BP right there in living sepia tones. Not to mention Newsarama, full page ads in CSN, the Ororo mini-series just put out with the ‘Wedding of the Century’ tagline right on the front cover! People, we’re not expecting Storm to be a bridesmaid here. We already know. Why bother trying to hype a book as it comes out when there’s already been a push for advertising months ago?

What got me typing here was a post by Mike’’s Progressive Ruin, talking about the reoccurring switch in Marvel’s stand on this whole ‘Dark Tower’ book they’re planning on putting out. So we’ve gone from “Stephen King is gonna write comics!” to “Stephen King will perhaps be collaborating on comics with a creative partner” to “Leonard Nimoy’s Primortals,” it seems. he says and I have to agree. It started out as the biggest announcement of the year from Marvel then sort of slipped down to ‘it’ll be really cool later, so just remember all this!’ to ‘hey, hey, don’t look behind the curtain, we’re not done yet!’

Sure, it’s nice to know what’s up and coming in the Marvel Universe, but when one of your ‘Big Tent’ story arcs is going to stretch into January of the next year? Maybe you might want to wait until the issues are coming out in order to get people interested as to not lose your momentum. Maybe you might want to wait on that press release until you look at Stephen King’s day-planner to make sure he won’t be swamped the month you’re going to release his comics. Maybe you might want to check to see how involved he’ll be in the project before you go putting his name all over the place.

And maybe, just maybe, people will care more about who Black Panther is marrying if we’re given a little surprise to the moment instead of having it sung ot the high heavens months before the issue actually comes out to read.

Then again, I could be wrong.