The necessary evil of comic book spoilers
Comic book marketing vs. surprise
Editor’s Note: It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s New Comic Book Day and another edition of Amazing Journey!
The Amazing Journey column will touch on a comics-related topic, such as writing the first issue of a series, what it’s like to run a comic book store, working with artists, and how writing comics is different from writing prose.
Amazing Journey back issues
True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8)
Those of you who are fastidious in monitoring the cycles of the direct market like I do probably know all of this already, but for the casual comic reader, here is the sequence of events that lead to your favorite comic showing up on the shelves of your local comic book store:
An issue is put on the release schedule by the publisher (how far in advance this occurs I do not know, but one day I hope to interview someone at Marvel or DC to give you all the real nitty gritty).
The issue is solicited, meaning that it appears in the catalog that shops use to place their orders. The solicitation includes the blurb and the cover. Before the catalog is officially released at the beginning of the month, the publisher will tease these details over the course of the prior month.
Customers can place their orders for issues coming out two months down the road. For example, the June 2023 catalog1 includes all the issues coming out in August 2023.
All orders for issues that come out a particular week have what is called a final order cut-off. This is the last date that shops can order a particular issue and be guaranteed to receive that issue. The number of issues ordered is usually the number of copies on the shop’s customers’ pull-lists plus some number of copies to keep out on the shelf for browsing customers. For the first issue in a series, the number of shelf copies ordered will be at its highest in the series’s run.
On the flip side, series that are dozens of issues deep into their runs usually have limited shelf copies ordered. So new readers either will have to get lucky that their shop has some back stock, or they can buy the trade paperback collecting earlier issues in the series. But most series’ sales atrophy over time as the issue count rises.
To boost sales of long-running series, the publisher can either restart the numbering and/or bring in a new creative team, or can create a new jumping0on point that features a status quo change in the story, so that new readers can come on board easier.
OK, that was a long introduction to one of the hot topics of the past few weeks: Amazing Spider-Man #26 and the Case of the Spoiled Spoiler.
If you haven’t been reading ASM since it was restarted at issue #1 last spring, the new run by Zeb Wells and John Romita Jr. opened with this:
Unfortunately, if you picked up the comic last spring and summer hoping for the answer to the above question, you were sadly let down, as the book tiptoed around this momentous event and acknowledged, but never explained, what had happened since the end of the Beyond arc.
However, with issue #21, answers were finally delivered, culminating in this week’s issue, in which it was teased that someone was going to die.
Oh, and this issue is dovetailing with the 50th anniversary of “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” aka one of the two true deaths in comics (the other being Uncle Ben). And it would be followed by a mysterious Fallen Friend one-shot in July and a presumably related “Classified” series starting in August.
So, there was a lot of hype about who was going to meet their demise in issue 26. And, thanks to the comic marketing/release cycle discussed above, this plot point has been simmering for several months now (and the next six issues of ASM have already been solicited before we’ve even reached today’s issue).
This all came to a head two weeks ago, when the identity of the character death was leaked to the media. On Tuesday of that week, Bleeding Cool had a spoiler-free article headline that basically said “Click here if you want to know who dies.” (This was a rather tame BC headline, as others are not as polite in leaving the spoiler out of the headline). These articles were followed by social media posts from Marvel urging everyone to beware of spoilers
But by Wednesday, the Internet had done a 180, with Entertainment Weekly running a full spoiler-laden story (with the spoiler in the headline) as an exclusive from Marvel itself, and every comic book news site thereafter deciding to abandon all pretense of keeping the secret.
Now, if you’ve successfully managed to not learn the spoiler, relax, as I’m not going to tell you, and I hope you enjoy reading the issue.
For the rest of us who aren’t so lucky, the question I have been wrestling with over the past two weeks is “does it matter?”
Direct market comics are by their nature a unique animal. They are a monthly periodical that must be continually ordered, and to build buzz and excitement, some details about the issue need to be teased ahead of time. But how much is too much?
The last big character death in comics (perhaps the biggest ever) was the Death of Superman in 1992, and Superman’s death was not only revealed in advance of the issue, but featured on the cover of Superman #75:
And with the relentless pace of a title like Amazing Spider-Man (which comes out multiple times a month), it really is quite difficult to drop a story-shattering event while at the same time creating covers and solicits for issues that are months away from release.
At the end of the day, the comic publishers need to make money. If Marvel had not teased the character death at all, shops would have ordered a smaller number of issues, which would have been immediately bought by speculators once the news leaked out at some point, followed by a rushed second printing and high prices on the secondary market. I don’t think anyone would have been happier in this scenario.2 But once the leak dropped (and after FOC, which meant shops couldn’t even order more issues to meet demand), there were no good solutions, unfortunately.
I’ll leave the final word to
, who offered Marvel’s perspective in his weekly newsletter (which you should definitely be reading):[W]e don’t love it when a story is spoiled ahead of time either. In this instance, we had coverage all set with Entertainment Weekly that was slated to be dropped when the issue came out. The negotiation for that coverage guaranteed them the exclusive to the story. So when somebody took a few blurry photos with their phone and posted them publicly weeks ahead of time, we were put into a corner. At that point, we really didn’t have much of a choice other than to go ahead and authorize EW to release their story immediately.
Read the rest of Tom’s thoughts on the matter here.
What do you think? Do you think comic spoilers are a necessary evil? Or should publishers try to figure out better ways to surprise readers with unexpected story events?
What I’m reading this week
It’s another light week in general, probably due to the fact that it is the fifth Wednesday of the month. Next week looks like a tour-de-force though!
Amazing Spider-Man #26: Someone will die!
Doctor Strange #3: This has been a fun mystery/monster-of-the-month type of book so far, exploring the magical side of the Marvel universe.
What are you picking up this week?
Three years ago, Diamond was the lone direct market distributor, so there was one catalog. Now there are more distributors distributing single issues to the direct market, which means more catalogs. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s pretend it’s still one giant catalog.
There is a longer discussion to be had as to the “why” of the leak, and the choice of the character death, which, if you interested in, you can find relatively easily.