OMD/BND: The thread that does not die!

[lostphrack]

Marvel has more devil's than you can shake a stick at. It's really kind of crazy. Mephisto and Marduk Kurios are two of the better known one's, but I'm pretty sure there's another three or four kicking around as well. I'd need to dig through my Marvel handbooks to be sure, but I was pretty boggled by the large amount of Satan like demonic figures Marvel had when reading through the Marvel Zombie's handbook.

[paulpogue]

"Satannish" is one of my favorite ones .

[jessebaker]

The vast list of bad places to end up in the afterlife thing is even subtly mocked in the most recent X-Men X-Over, as far as them showing Pluto, Hela, Mephisto, Blackheart, and the rest of the deities having a board meeting to discuss Magik's conquest of Limbo-Hell and having a big ass arguement about whether or not to recognize Belasco's kid (Witchfire)'s claim of being the rightful ruler of Limbo-Hell on the basis that most of the board never really considered Belasco worthy of joining the "Devil Club" and only tolerated his pressence in the group for the sake of those who did consider him worthy of membership in the group.

[lostphrack]

Jan 14, 2009 10:17:29 GMT -8 paulpogue said:

"Satannish" is one of my favorite ones .

He's not quite Satan, just Satannish, but if he tries hard enough than.. someday. Maybe.

[K-Box]

Obama's appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #583, all FIVE PAGES of it, posted by killerweasel on scans_daily (click the cover to read the story):



This way, none of you have to wait in hour-long lines to be told that the stores have already sold out of an issue whose only remotely worthwhile content is all linked above, and you can avoid paying Marvel any amount of money for a desperate sales stunt that doesn't do any real favors to either Barack Obama or Spider-Man.

Every time anyone tries to bring back the comic book speculator market of the 1990s, God kills a kitten Mephisto retcons a superhero's marriage.

[michaelpaciocco]

And continuing the epic pwnage of the Marvel/DC zeitgeist, ItsJustSomeRandomGuy's latest.




Ah, the sweet sweet smell of pwning Marvel, DC, and their movie corporate masters in 10 minutes of YouTubery.

Taste the glory.

[K-Box]

NuSpidey sales charts: WATERSHED, BITCHES.

*Ahem*

On Jan. 30, 2008, Paul O'Brien posted the following:

The reboot is a high risk strategy, and I suspect that after the initial burst of excitement, the new AMAZING will settle down at a significantly lower number. But let’s not forget the bigger picture. Between September 2006 and August 2007, the three Spider-Man titles sold a combined total of 2,284,676 copies in the North American direct market. If the new AMAZING achieves its target of 36 issues a year, it can match that total with a relatively modest audience of 63,463.

Now, stranger things have happened, but I really can’t imagine the audience dropping off by quite that much.

On Jan. 20, 2009, ICv2 posted its sales figures for December, so once again, I'll be using those to track the sales trends for the NuSpidey era to date, together with previously released monthly sales figures also drawn from ICv2:

( Link to updated sales charts on my LiveJournal: )

So, let's review, shall we?

Paul O'Brien's "magic number:" 63,463.
Amazing Spider-Man #580: 62,979.

MAGIC NUMBER

Amazing Spider-Man #579 and #581 both had variant covers, and Amazing Spider-Man #580 was longtime fan-favorite writer Roger Stern's debut on the NuSpidey era.

And this is the best they can do for sales anymore, with those types of issues.

The good news for Marvel is that we all already know that Amazing Spider-Man #583 sold like fucking gangbusters. The bad news for Marvel is that I don't see that making any amount of difference whatsoever in the title's accelerating downward sales trend.

The NuSpidey status quo is now officially dead on its feet. The only question that remains is when Marvel itself will finally recognize that fact.

P.S. For any NuSpidey supporters out there who might say, "Yeah, sales of individual issues of Amazing Spider-Man might be down lately, but ALL comic book sales are trending down now, thanks to the down economy," allow me to point out that, no, they're not.

P.P.S. How far will sales fall in January? Well, let's do the math:

The sales difference between the lowest-selling issue of October and the lowest-selling issue of November was a drop of 3.4 percent.

The sales difference between the lowest-selling issue of November and the lowest-selling issue of December was a drop of 5.4 percent.

This is what I meant when I called it an "accelerating downward sales trend," because the sales on this title are now falling at velocity.

Given this trend, the sales difference between the lowest-selling issue of December and the lowest-selling issue of January could be a drop of as much as 7.4 percent.

So, how dire is this prognosis, for the NuSpidey status quo? Again, let's just go to the math, using 62,979 - the sales low for December - as our baseline:

If it goes back to a drop rate of only 3.4 percent, the sales low for January becomes 60,838.

If it continues to drop at a rate of 5.4 percent, the sales low for January becomes 59,578.

If it goes up to a drop rate of 7.4 percent, the sales low for January becomes 58,319.

No matter how you look at it, this is a deeply ugly set of new "magic numbers" for Marvel.

[paulpogue]

NERDGLEE.

The denial will continue for quite some time, but at this point, I simply cannot envision the One More Day status quo surviving through 2009. If Quesada is as smart as the guy who engineered Marvel Knights and the Morrison X-Men was, he's already tuning up the "We were just messing with fans all along, and totally had a plan to undo it from the beginning" talking points. Which will be a total copout, but probably better for his ego and the Marvel board of directors than "Wow, I totally blew it and tanked our flagship book's sales, didn't I?"

And as you point out, the falloff is ACCELERATING. It might happen a lot sooner than the end of 2009 at this rate. 50,000 is very much within sight, and 40,000/issue is no longer unthinkable. (And seriously, what are Brevoort and Quesada's explanations going to be THEN?) They have not added new readers AT ALL, no matter WHAT they do, and every month more readers drop off. It's an astonishing slow-motion train wreck in which the train just keeps adding cars at the end to pile up.

Also, 583 might not help them that much, given the low pre-orders for it.

[K-Box]

I'm STILL seeing people try to spin this as being the economy's fault, which doesn't account for the poor performance of ASM relative of the other titles on the charts. Even with variant covers, only one of December's three issues made it into the top 20; discount those two variant cover issues, and it's barely even in the top 30.

The Obama issue won't help one bit, because - perhaps thanks to the early saturation of variant covers - we're now to the point where variant covers and sales stunts like NWtD don't even SLOW DOWN the sales drop anymore. Given the rate of the sales drop, you almost wouldn't even know that there WERE any variant cover issues, and I predict that the sales immediately following the Obama issue will track as though that issue didn't even EXIST.

The next two benchmarks I'm waiting for are 59K and 50K; 59K so that people will stop claiming, as even Paul O'Brien insists on doing, that the title is "hovering in the low 70s," and 50K because THAT number is simply going to crush the SOULS of anyone who still supports the NuSpidey status quo.

[K-Box]

All this being said, though, I could honestly see us entering 2010 with the NuSpidey status quo intact, and by that time, if it does last long enough to end during 2010, the ONLY reason it will end at that point will be if Quesada gets FIRED.

You continue to give Quesada too much credit, Paul. Looking back on it, the ONLY "talent" he's ever had has been his Rolodex, which is why he's leaning so heavily on guys like Bendis and Millar, and is so eager to promote guys like Slott to the big time, because when it comes to guys he used to have working for him, like Morrison, he's pissed off so many of them that he has precious few other creators left.

Also, let's not forget, an unmarried Spider-Man is Quesada's DREAM; all the way back in 2001, he was starting FLAME WARS on the Alvaro ComicBoards, over his then-hinted-at plans to have Peter and Mary Jane divorce, and Mary Jane return to the books after a few years, without any reference made to the fact that they were ever married (he honestly thought that he could get away with this as a soft retcon of the marriage, until HUNDREDS of message board posters told him how wrong he was).

In short, however sensible or rational Quesada might be (and I don't give him much credit on that score), he will not have ANY sanity or logic when it comes to maintaining the undoing of the Spider-marriage. I can honestly see him logging onto a message board and telling the readers that he'd rather NOBODY was buying the books than that they ever revert his retcons, at which point, he would probably be handed his golden parachute by management, and told that he could either quit or be fired.

If and when OMD is reversed, they're SERIOUSLY going to need to put Quesada on a suicide-watch.

And his defensive attitude has infected his "brain trust," since even in his latest interviews about "Character Assassination," Guggenheim literally can't speak three sentences without mentioning the BND "haters," even when his interviewers haven't referenced them in any way.

The Spider-Man editorial offices are confused and scared and angry, and they're going to take it out on us a lot more before they even THINK about trying to make it better.

[michaelpaciocco]

It's going to be a fun year, isn't it?

[paulpogue]

Jan 20, 2009 11:29:43 GMT -8 K-Box said:

All this being said, though, I could honestly see us entering 2010 with the NuSpidey status quo intact, and by that time, if it does last long enough to end during 2010, the ONLY reason it will end at that point will be if Quesada gets FIRED.

You continue to give Quesada too much credit, Paul. Looking back on it, the ONLY "talent" he's ever had has been his Rolodex, which is why he's leaning so heavily on guys like Bendis and Millar, and is so eager to promote guys like Slott to the big time, because when it comes to guys he used to have working for him, like Morrison, he's pissed off so many of them that he has precious few other creators left.

Also, let's not forget, an unmarried Spider-Man is Quesada's DREAM; all the way back in 2001, he was starting FLAME WARS on the Alvaro ComicBoards, over his then-hinted-at plans to have Peter and Mary Jane divorce, and Mary Jane return to the books after a few years, without any reference made to the fact that they were ever married (he honestly thought that he could get away with this as a soft retcon of the marriage, until HUNDREDS of message board posters told him how wrong he was).

In short, however sensible or rational Quesada might be (and I don't give him much credit on that score), he will not have ANY sanity or logic when it comes to maintaining the undoing of the Spider-marriage. I can honestly see him logging onto a message board and telling the readers that he'd rather NOBODY was buying the books than that they ever revert his retcons, at which point, he would probably be handed his golden parachute by management, and told that he could either quit or be fired.

If and when OMD is reversed, they're SERIOUSLY going to need to put Quesada on a suicide-watch.

And his defensive attitude has infected his "brain trust," since even in his latest interviews about "Character Assassination," Guggenheim (Kirk's pet word deleted) can't speak three sentences without mentioning the BND "haters," even when his interviewers haven't referenced them in any way.

The Spider-Man editorial offices are confused and scared and angry, and they're going to take it out on us a lot more before they even THINK about trying to make it better.

I probably do give Quesada too much credit as a potential puppet-master; namely, I don't expect him to ever reverse OMD as a matter of good storytelling, but a part of me thought that maybe the sheer reality of economics and the board of directors breathing down his back would push him to do the change.

But you're right; his history shows a pathological obsession with this going back eight years. He'll probably only ever change it if the big guns come down hard and say "Undo this or we'll have someone undo it for you," at which point I give only 50 percent odds he'll cooperate, even at the threat of his job.

However, I'm still guessing that we'll see serious motion towards the undoing in 2009, if not outright completion; if the numbers continue to fall at this rate, we could conceivably be looking at the 30,000 mark by year's end. And that's too severe for any of the corporate suits above JQ to tolerate.

[K-Box]

The following is from Amazing Spider-Man #584, by Marc Guggenheim and John Romita Jr.

Let us count all the ways in which this fails:




1. O HAI PREACHY POLITICAL OPINION INSERTED INTO SCENE AND MOUTH OF CHARACTER IN WHICH IT DOESN'T FIT. I mean, I actually AGREE with Boomerang here, and I STILL find this speech insufferable.

2. Oh, look, a scene where a couple of small-time crooks debate the ethics of something that you wouldn't expect them to care about, on account of them routinely performing even more ethically questionable criminal acts! That's so funny and original! Or at least, it might be, if Quentin Tarantino and his legions of imitators in the 1990s hadn't devoted half the screentime of almost all of their films to extremely similar scenes, all the way back to Mr. Pink and Mr. White arguing over Mr. Pink's refusal to tip the waitress in Reservoir Dogs. But that's okay, Marc Guggenheim, because Brian Michael Bendis also loves the shit out of pointless "conversational" dialogue that does nothing to advance the plot or reveal anything about the characters, so you're in good company there at Marvel.

3. Okay, look, I know that expecting any semblance of continuity in Spider-Man stories after "One More Day" is about as futile as expecting the writers and editors of those same stories to stop being stupid, spiteful, lying bitches in their interviews and interactions with their prospective consumers, but still, seriously, both the Shocker and Boomerang MUST have been arrested, at least ONE time each by now, for their bullshit, and while I'm not exactly "up" on the law, I do seem to recall that convicted felons tend to LOSE their voting rights. And hasn't Boomerang long been established as being, you know, AUSTRALIAN? Does he even have LEGAL ALIEN status in this country? Then again, I suppose I'm being a bit petty and nit-picky by even bringing this up, since it's not like, say, Marc Guggenheim has practiced law himself, or anything.

How the fuck does Marc Guggenheim continue to get work, when everything he's ever written has been 100-percent terrible? His work on Amazing Spider-Man, Eli Stone and Jack & Bobby all stands as a testament to the exact OPPOSITE of what any remotely worthwhile writer should do, but then again, I suppose that's why a gigantically ANTI-talented asshole like Joe Quesada would be naturally inclined to love the fuck out of this guy's shitty stories.

[K-Box]

Predicting the January sales charts ...

Holy shit, I can't believe I didn't notice this sooner.

Exactly one week ago today, Brian Hibbs posted this month's Tilting at Windmills column - one which I'd strongly urge you all to read, for a number of different reasons - in which he did an excellent job of explaining the difficulties that many retailers faced in obtaining the Obama variant cover of Amazing Spider-Man #583:

[Quoting from the "Marvel Mailer":] You can order the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583 OBAMA VARIANT without restriction if your orders of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583 regular cover by FOC are higher than your orders for AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #575 by FOC.

[...] The recent trend on variant covers has been a declining one – there are so many of them offered each month that they’ve ceased to be special. Further, the overall sales trend on “Amazing Spider-Man” has been a downwards one – at Comix Experience we’ve been losing roughly 10% a month in sales since “New Ways to Die” ended. So, really, the idea of exceeding our orders from eight issues back, in order to be able to order any of the Obama cover, wasn’t something that really registered to me as a viable possibility.

[...] Some (many?) stores missed the incentive by a single copy, unfortunately reading “exceed” as “match-to,” and so aren’t receiving a single copy of the Obama cover.

So, a significant number of retailers weren't willing to take what they saw as a financial risk, by ordering Amazing Spider-Man #583 in numbers to exceed those in which they ordered Amazing Spider-Man #575. Likewise, a significant number of retailers were only willing to risk ordering Amazing Spider-Man #583 in numbers that would just barely equal those in which they ordered Amazing Spider-Man #575.

And that's how we get our latest magic number:

68,913.

"68,913" is what ICv2 lists as the sales number for Amazing Spider-Man #575.

Retailers were willing to order 68,913 copies of Amazing Spider-Man #575.

It would seem that retailers were NOT willing to order 68,913 copies of Amazing Spider-Man #583.

Not even with the promise of an ultra-collectible Obama variant cover.

Ladies and gentlemen, THIS is the NuSpidey era's newest "high water mark."

And if that's how poorly the Obama variant cover issue of Amazing Spider-Man sold (in INITIAL orders, because with this issue already in ... what, its fourth printing, by now? I wouldn't be surprised to see it topping the charts for January), then just imagine how poorly the OTHER two issues of Amazing Spider-Man in January sold.

[lostphrack]

The Boomerang I knew remembered to shave in the morning. He was also a better looking than this slob. Yeesh, how the mighty have fallen.