Like a lot of comic fans, I have 4-5 comic news sources in my RSS feed: iFanboy, Comic Book Resources, Bleeding Cool, Newsarama, ComicVine, IGN, etc.
One thing I laugh at is when most of them run the same 5-6 preview pages for an upcoming comic because the level of "journalism" there is merely repasting something sent to you by the Marvel/DC/Image PR and Marketing group. My first thought is always, "Fellas....how about create some original content for your readers instead of regurgitating something that everyone else is also publishing." Honestly, it's like a bucket brigade for those pages: letterer to editor to marketing to press release to release on the web.
But....how lame is the 5-6 page preview to begin with?
What other entertainment medium markets itself this way? Imagine if instead of seeing the AWESOME trailer for the Hobbit movie, the movie studio just sent out the first 90 seconds of the finished film. Wouldn't that suck? Same thing with TV: When they show those "scenes from next week's episode" what if they just showed us the first 15 seconds of the episode? Again....that would suck.
As far as I know, novels aren't marketed this way either: "Here's the first paragraph. Enjoy!"
Sure it would be a SMALL amount of work for a company like Marvel, but why not rip out 4-5 juicy panels (tell the colorist and letterer to finish those panels first) from the next issue and splice them together like a movie trailer? Or does that make too much sense?
- Dean Stell
[Note: I don't want to hear that the problem is that the issues are barely getting done in time and that maybe the first 5 pages is all they've got. That's just a business operations problem and is addressable by better management.]
Novels are, in fact, advertised that way...at least, they used to be. I don't buy many modern novels. Quite often you'd find the first chapter or so of the next volume of a series at the end of the preceding installment.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't splicing four of five panels together be largely incoherent? I don't think that would work the same way as you intend (i.e. like a movie trailer which, by the way, are often largely incoherent themselves.) It might make sense to actually choose the pages/scene that makes up the preview, though, rather than just automatically taking the first few.
I actually think it's kind of funny to use previews for 20 page comics in the first place. I really don't want to read 1/4 of the book before I even get it. Kinda shows you how short comic books can be.