Me Geek, You Geek: August 2008

So I was reading Mighty Avengers #16 and New Avengers #43 and this thought occurred to me. A thought I had to post and see what you all have to say. Like most of the thoughts and ideas I have, I think it is a brilliant one. But I think I might be a tad bit biased. I think.

So reading these two comics, these two "tie ins" to Secret Invasion and reading the new issue of Wizard (don't ask me why) in which they have Bendis and Yu talk about the first 4 issues of Secret Invasion I got to thinking.

First of all, like any pure fanboy the inconsistencies of a crossover event like this drives me nuts. In one issue of Secret Invasion you have Reed Richards being shot to all hell, like a silly puddy accident gone wrong and in yet another issue of SI you have him stretched out and being poked and prodded by Skrulls like a rectal exam gone wrong.

But what about the main Fantastic Four book you might ask? He's fine. Running around, no problems.

Carrot Sticks!

Same can be said about many of these characters, such as Daredevil (he's on Mighty Avengers #16 cover but no where in sight inside the book), Captain America, Spidey, Wolverine and on and on.

This issue has plagued comics for years. And really, unless you tie up the entire line of books into a eight month event that would be a logistical nightmare. So there is no way to fix this right?

Aha...that's where I come in.

This is really so simple I can't believe they haven't thought of it yet. (And probably so simple that I am missing something major that would null this idea)

Just release the big events in a trade paperback! Right from the get go. Just have Bendis write all the issues and pay Yu to draw all the issues and it will come out in one shot. We can sit down and read the entire story and then go back to our regular comics. If they decide not to talk about how Reed Richards was blown apart that is fine, at least it seems like it all actually happened.

If you look at the price per issue is $3.99 a piece and multiply that by 8 issues, that is $31.92 worth of money we spend. The last trade I bought from Marvel had a price tag of $29.99. Pretty close. I am assuming as well that printing one trade is cheaper than printing 8 individual issues. So maybe they would start to make some money back from the loss of ad sales (see below)? And you have to take in to account the amount of money they would save advertising the series themselves! Marketing one book is much more cost efficient than marketing 10-12 months of a series (since we started hearing about this well before the issues hit the stands).

And I first thought there would be a bigger financial risk involved for the comic book company since they would be paying for 8 issues of writing and art before they make any money back at all. But it's not like if a series was not doing well that they would cancel it since it is maxi or mini series. And they would still have order numbers before they went to print. The could release a hard cover version as well to increase sales.

Now before you critics start in on me, I can think of one major problem that screams that this would not be the wisest of choices business wise. And let's face it, Marvel is a business to make money, especially since they are publicly traded company. A lot of money is made on single issues, then we usually pick up the trades too. That would be a lot of revenue lost on advertisement in each issue and so far we don't have ads in in trade paperbacks.

Also, for advertisers to pay the big bucks it is easier for Marvel to say that they can put an ad in 8 issues that are each selling 100,000 copies (for arguments sake...). Take 100,000 and multiply it by 8 issues and that is 800,000 impressions for the ad (if the ad runs throughout the series).

But if you simply ran the whole story in one book there would only be 100,000 impressions, which I assume would be a huge reduction in price points for the advertisements. So that is my ideas true weakness.

They would have to load up the TPB with a ton of ads to make up for those lost impressions. Which would be odd. So that would be a shift we would have to make as readers.

But other then that, are there any other problems to this theory? Besides missing the cliffhangers (which are far and few between and actually have been coming as splash pages in the middle of SI issues).

I know for a fact that I would enjoy this more as it would be a self contained story