More on Cap

I went to the comic book store last night to get my books. I usually go every 2-3 weeks and was planning to go last night before the big news broke. I’ve been reading Captain America as it gets collected in paperback format, and it’s honestly one of the best single character books Marvel is publishing right now, if you like the character. Anyway, the man at the store said that he’d had quite a day, and that the phone had been ringing off the hook. This was about 5:45 or so, and he already didn’t have any copies of Captain America 25 left on the shelves. He said if I really wanted one he had a stack of about 10 left, but they were otherwise being held for people who’d called in earlier that day. I said I’d wait, as I’ll end up buying the trade, anyway and I already knew what happened. (In addition, this week’s Civil War: The Initiative reprints a portion of the issue, but I wouldn’t recommend buying it overall.) He said that Marvel had overprinted this issue, but at 9:00 that morning had announced they would not be doing a second printing. By 3:00 they’d changed that to “probably not” be doing a second printing, so it’s quite possible that they’ll have more on the shelves but not until the hype has already blown over.

Brian Hibbs, comic retailed blogger, has this to say about it:

I wish Marvel had laid out the score for us a lot better — certainly when Superman was killed, we knew MONTHS in advance, and it resulted in millions of copies ordered. Even with the supposed generous overprint, I’ll be surprised if we end up with even the same number of copies of CAP #25 on the market as CIVIL WAR (ie, nowhere near enough). The REAL problem is, because (I’m guessing) the reorders are going to fill from newstand copies, and because of the way that Diamond and Marvel work with OSDs (over-short-damage), it seems likely that reorders won’t arrive for 2 more weeks. That’s going to be way too late, I think.

A slow news day meant that the book got lots of media coverage, and Captain America’s an old school wartime hero, so interest seems to be higher than it would otherwise be. Still, I like to see how these things look to people who don’t read comics. For one, it’s common knowledge that characters don’t stay dead. All of the major media coverage of Steve Rogers’ death include comments about how characters come back from the dead frequently, and Joe Quesada remains flippant about it in each story. I’d say it’s quite possible he will stay dead, but it’s also possible in the very next issue we’ll see that the assassination was a cover to get him back into the field and escape trial.

Also, it’s interesting to see which characters in each publisher’s stables are big enough for people to even know who they are. In terms of public consciousness, DC Comics has Batman and Superman, then Wonder Woman, and that’s about it. Some people know a few more from Superfriends or more recently Justice League. For Marvel, you’ve got Spider-man and the X-Men on the top tier, then the Hulk and, I guess the Fantastic Four. Iron Man’s getting a movie next summer (which might actually be good), but Captain America hasn’t had any film coverage in years, excluding a few direct-to-DVD cartoons, which is odd because, in my opinion, he’s really their third-best property after Spider-Man and the X-Men.

Spoiler of the Week: Captain America

Pick up your copy of Captain America 25 fast. The New York Daily News has already spoiled the ending, and I’d suspect some other news sources to follow suit. If you really want to know what happens, here’s the article.

Edit: CNN has the story now, too.

It should be noted that Marvel intentionally seeds these stories to hit the day they hit stores to draw people into retail stores. Naturally they want to sell books, but it sucks that surprise endings are often ruined. The problem is that most retailers are small independent stores that have to manage their inventory very tightly. They’ll order enough copies for their regular customers, and then a few extra for walk-ins. Marvel’s been hyping this issue as an important one, so it’s probable that stores knew to over-order it, but chances are it’ll sell out and take a few weeks to restock, ruining the buzz.

Some Wild Reading for You

1. Teens kill homeless guy for fun. One of them remarks that it was like a violent video game, which the media has lots of fun with.
2. Penny Arcade publishes a little editorial saying that, as any reasonable person knows, violent video games didn’t lead the kids to murder, and blames it on bad parenting.
3. The step-mother of one of the kids writes into Penny Arcade and explains that the kid was basically a psycopath.

Breaking News?

While I’m on the topic of the news, I’d like to point out the lax editorial standard for what constitutes “breaking news” on CNN’s homepage. Today, a bright red banner reads, President Bush’s policy in Iraq is not working, the Iraq Study Group said in releasing its long-awaited report. Important? Yes. Breaking? No. Over Thanksgiving my dad said a friend of his had been in the gym on the treadmill, when the news flashed a “breaking news” bulletin. A few people gathered around the TV, fearing there had been a major disaster somewhere. Instead, the “news” was about a celebrity’s divorce filings.

See also:

1. The Boy Who Cried Wolf
2. Breaking News is Broken

Weblogs and the News

I’ve been following the story of James Kim and his family over the past week. CNN has a nice little box at the top of their developing stories that gives you the newest bullet points on a story, which made me remember something I had started thinking about when I was waiting to see if Jim Webb would beat George Allen last month: the use of reverse chronological posts, i.e., the weblog format.

When I know nothing about a given topic, which is most of the time regarding breaking news, I want a well-written article that tells me what’s going on. But when I’m following a developing story, I just want to be able to log in and read the latest, since I already know all the backstory that makes up the bulk of the article. News sites could easily include a sidebar in every story with time-stamped information, so that I could tell at a glance if anything new had happened since the last time I checked in on a story. From there, it wouldn’t be hard to offer individual RSS feeds for that category of stories, with links to the full articles for further reading.

See also: A fundamental way news sites need to change.

Trial of the Century Vol. 2

During last night’s The West Wing, NBC decided to shrink the screen down to make room for a banner directing us to change the channel to MSNBC to follow a breaking story. Keep in mind that advertisers spend lots of money supporting prime time television, so a network would never direct its viewers to stop watching its programming unless the story were very important. A big story warranting banner treatment usually falls into one of two categories:

• Local weather-related disaster, or
• National/international tragedy.

Alas, I had forgotten about the third type:

*Celebrity spectacle.

Yes, Michael Jackson’s indictment was deemed so important by the NBC/MSNBC network heads that they directed us to immediatly change the channel and start watching their anchors babble with little information over pictures of Michael entering or leaving the courhouse.

They can only hope that it goes to trial just after the Friends finale.

Bias

I’ve been watching mostly MSNBC when I want to see the news lately, along with a smattering of CNN. At some point I’m going to gather up the courage to watch Fox News too see what they’re about.

One thing I’ve been looking for is political bias. The news networks have been showing with some frequency pieces of President Bush’s military base speech yesterday. At one point he finishes a pretty good section of his speech which is met with uproarious cheering and applause. Liberal-slanted CNN has been showing that clip cut right before the applause starts.

On a completely different subject, another short has been released from The Animatrix, titled “Detective Story.”