Headlines gone wild!
Every so often I come across some hype or some marketing that (in my opinion) humorously gets it all wrong. Either it markets a story that's not what is being told, it promises things it can't deliver, or best of all, it just sounds confused.
Take this blurb for X-Men: Worlds Apart for instance.
Point 1: Storm has in fact returned to the X-Men in Ellis's Astonishing X-Men. How long-lasting, who knows, but given the recent interviews suggesting a more fluid X-team structure (thus allowing Emma Frost to be in every X-story. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing) there's no reason to believe Storm can't continue being an X-Man who only pops up for occasional stories.
Point 2: Headline for that blurb for X-Men: Worlds Apart - "Storm returns to the X-Men"
Point 3: Marketing hype trying to explain why this story "matters" (and presumably why it was named X-Men: Worlds Apart rather than Storm (vol. __) or something less distinctly marketed because presumably the average reader is more likely to pick up an X-title focusing exclusively on one character, than a solo mini, and for the eventual bookstore placement it's presumably better to have it placed with the other X-books, rather than next to the Spider-man and Squadron Supreme trades) - blah blah blah "What she discovers, though, may force her into a position where she must decide: Will she remain a queen or return to her mutant teammates, the X-Men?"
Come on now. Calling it X-Men: Worlds Apart seems like a cheap attempt to game the alphanumeric organization, a little like aaa____username profiles. Marvel has gotten a little shameless with this recently, for example, in tying up both it's Excalibur and Exiles titles, Marvel threw them into a mini-series called X-Men Die by the Sword. Magneto, despite having already carried a few mini-series, gets his origin re-told in X-Men: Magneto Testament. But it's an unfortunate fact of editorial mandate that the events of a solo-character mini-series are unlikely to over-rule the developments of two ongoing series (Astonishing and Black Panther), and if you want us to at least pretend there's a chance something, anything, is actually going to happen, how about using a headline that plays along?
And we now return you to your every day programming.
Take this blurb for X-Men: Worlds Apart for instance.
Point 1: Storm has in fact returned to the X-Men in Ellis's Astonishing X-Men. How long-lasting, who knows, but given the recent interviews suggesting a more fluid X-team structure (thus allowing Emma Frost to be in every X-story. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing) there's no reason to believe Storm can't continue being an X-Man who only pops up for occasional stories.
Point 2: Headline for that blurb for X-Men: Worlds Apart - "Storm returns to the X-Men"
Point 3: Marketing hype trying to explain why this story "matters" (and presumably why it was named X-Men: Worlds Apart rather than Storm (vol. __) or something less distinctly marketed because presumably the average reader is more likely to pick up an X-title focusing exclusively on one character, than a solo mini, and for the eventual bookstore placement it's presumably better to have it placed with the other X-books, rather than next to the Spider-man and Squadron Supreme trades) - blah blah blah "What she discovers, though, may force her into a position where she must decide: Will she remain a queen or return to her mutant teammates, the X-Men?"
Come on now. Calling it X-Men: Worlds Apart seems like a cheap attempt to game the alphanumeric organization, a little like aaa____username profiles. Marvel has gotten a little shameless with this recently, for example, in tying up both it's Excalibur and Exiles titles, Marvel threw them into a mini-series called X-Men Die by the Sword. Magneto, despite having already carried a few mini-series, gets his origin re-told in X-Men: Magneto Testament. But it's an unfortunate fact of editorial mandate that the events of a solo-character mini-series are unlikely to over-rule the developments of two ongoing series (Astonishing and Black Panther), and if you want us to at least pretend there's a chance something, anything, is actually going to happen, how about using a headline that plays along?
And we now return you to your every day programming.
posted by Clever Name at
12:49 PM
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