davextreme: spiderman

Showing posts with label spiderman. Show all posts

04 January 2008

Brand New Day

I’m loathe to admit that the new Spider-Man Brand New Day actually looks kinda good. Economically, though, if it’s shipping three times a month, that means it has to be three times as good to justify the purchase, which I don’t think it will be.

04 December 2007

Straczynski on One More Day

Wow. Even J. Michael Straczynski, the guy who’s writing the book, doesn’t like the idea of un-doing Peter and Mary Jane Parker’s marriage.

25 September 2007

One More Day Delays

Paul O’Brien’s analysis of Marvel’s month-to-month sales for August 2007 are up. I’ll quote at length from his writeup about Amazing Spider-Man, but there’s a lot of good analysis here about other stuff, too:

For all practical purposes, this was the last month of the three separate Spider-Man titles. Amazing, Sensational and Friendly all tied up their storylines, leaving the way clear for One More Day.
The original plan, you’ll recall, was that One More Day would run weekly through all three Spider-Man books in September. Sensational and Friendly would then be cancelled [sic], and in October, Amazing would come out three times a month instead. In other words, the three existing Spider-Man monthlies are going to be merged into a one book, shipping 36 times a year.
Unfortunately, One More Day has gone off the scheduling rails, and so the new Amazing has been pushed back to December. That book can hardly ship extra issues to catch up, so effectively the delay to One More Day has cost two months of Spider-Man sales. It’ll have to perform very well to justify that.
Now, as we all know, Amazing sells a lot better than its two siblings. Plainly, the hope is that Spider-Man fans will buy every issue of the merged title, while before they just bought Amazing nine times a year, and ignored the two satellite books. But it’s also likely that some existing readers of Amazing will decide that they don’t want to buy 36 issues a year, or that they’re jumping ship with the outgoing creative team. So, how well does the new Amazing need to sell, in order to be judged a success?
Well, the short answer is that Marvel will come out ahead if the merged title shifts more copies than Amazing, Friendly and Sensational are presently managing between them. But then, Amazing doesn’t ship twelve times a year—it misses issues all over the place and never catches them up. So let’s take the whole last year as our comparison. Between September 2006 and August 2007, the three existing Spider-Man titles sold an estimated total of 2,284,676 copies in the direct market. At 36 issues a year, the new Amazing can equal total by selling an average of 63,463 copies per issue. Which isn’t really that much. It can do that without making the top 30. I’d be very surprised if the merged book fails to beat that target.

I’m not a fan of the One More Day concept, but I think the idea of moving to a single Spider-Man book that ships more often, rather than three separate, unrelated ones, is very interesting. That said, I don’t think that I’ll buy 36 issues of Amazing Spider-Man a year.

17 June 2007

"Amazing, Amazing, Amazing"

As announced in Philadelphia this weekend, Amazing Spider-Man will move to a three-a-month shipping schedule in the fall. Currently there are three Spider-Man titles: Amazing Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and Sensational Spider-Man (née the “Marvel Knights” Spider-Man). As with Superman and Action Comics and with Batman and Detective Comics, each title usually tells its own story about the main character. There’s the occasional crossover story, but generally you can just read one of the titles and get your fix. So there are three Spider-Man books, but most people don’t read all three. As editor Steve Wacker puts it:

Amazing is the “main” book to most readers and the feeling is that the important Spider-man stuff happens between its covers. No matter how good the creators and stories might be on the supporting books, when forced to choose, most readers lean towards Amazing.

According to Paul O’Brien’s estimates of Marvel’s March 2007 sales, Amazing Spider-Man 539 sold 137,730 copies. That’s a bit high as it was the first issue of a big storyline (Spider-Man being back in his black costume), but it’s by far Spidey’s best seller. That month Sensational sold 56,139 copies and Friendly Neighborhood sold 50,665, so both of them combined don’t sell what the “main” title does. I’d suspect that most of the 50,000 people buying one or the other of the latter two titles are buying both, so it’s possible to assume that there are about 50,000 hardcover Spidey fans out there who are buying all three titles every single month (plus, probably, Ultimate Spider-Man and New Avengers, of which he’s a member), which leaves ~80,000 readers who only buy Amazing each month.

So how many people are going to stick with Amazing when it goes tri-monthly? The 50,000 hardcore readers aren’t a concern – they already buy three Spider-Man books a month. How many of the remaining 80,000 readers will stick with the new book? If all of them do, Marvel will have picked up 160,000 sales each month, which is well over what launching two brand new books would have gotten them. If even half of the readers stick with it, that’s 80,000 extra readers, which is as well as most of their top books do (in March that’s what Uncanny X-Men sold, and it’s stayed at that level for years).

The question of course lies in how many people decide they care enough about Spider-Man to shell out the extra $5.98 for the two extra books each month. There won’t be a choice anymore to just read one book, so you’ll either pay $9.00 a month to read Spider-Man, or you’ll pay nothing. I’m a bit doubtful that I’ll stick with it, but the advantage is that the story will move along at a very nice pace. If the writing quality is good there will be some real momentum and, even if Marvel isn’t able to keep it up for more than a year or so, they could cut it back to bi-monthly and still probably stay above the numbers they were selling with three different books.

15 June 2007

"Amazing, amazing, amazing."

“Amazing, amazing, amazing.”

Amazing Spider-Man to ship three times a month, Friendly and Spectacular to end.

06 May 2007

The Perils of Coincidence

The perils of coincidence

Critique of Spider-Man 3’s story. For the record I enjoyed the movie, but agree that the story was too weighed down and depended on coincidence too heavily.

29 March 2007

Kutaragi "Insisted" on Spider-Man Font for PS3

Kutaragi “insisted” on Spider-Man font for PS3

I’ve always felt the logotype gives the console a very cheap look to it. It’s so recognizable as “the Spider-Man font” that it just looks like they were too lazy to come up with something unique.

15 March 2007

List of characters in the Spider-Ham Universe

Marvel’s parody of its own characters is just so funny to me.

21 February 2007

The Old Black: Looking Back at Spider-Man's Black Costume

The Old Black: Looking Back at Spider-Man’s Black Costume

History of Spidey’s black costume.

12 January 2007

Spider-Man 3's Venom revealed ... again

Spider-Man 3’s Venom revealed … again

I miss the white on the costume, but I’m sure it’ll look great in motion on the big screen.

10 November 2006

Spider-Man 3 Trailer

26 October 2006

Stuart Immonen confirmed as new Ultimate Spider-Man artist

He’ll be taking over when Mark Bagley leaves after a record 110 issues on the same book.

20 July 2006

Sensational

I usually get comics every 3 weeks or so. Always when there’s a new issue of whatever the current hot series is. At the moment that means Civil War. Supposedly it’s selling more issues than anything has in a decade, which I believe if the number of people in my store yesterday is any indication.

I haven’t had time to read through my whole stack from yesterday but, aside from Civil War 3 being predictably excellent, The Sensational Spider-Man 28 is my early pick for best of the week (well, it came out last week). Ignore that the cover would be great if it didn’t make Peter look a tad creepy. The story inside is about a kid who just found out his favorite teacher is Spider-Man. It’s a one-shot issue that requires no set-up to get into, the art is great, and the story is grounded and just a little touching.

Back to Civil War talk (no spoilers, don’t worry)… If you go back and read Grant Morrison’s issues of JLA, there’s suddenly a part where Superman is Superman Blue, in the brief time when DC was messing with the character and gave him new powers. All that stuff happened in the pages of Superman’s many books, but JLA had to reflect the change to the character, even though it ended up being a temporary thing. There’s a moment in Civil War 3 where a character kind of points out that Spider-Man is wearing a new costume. It’s a bit of a throw-away line that’s mostly there for the benefit of readers who don’t know that the guy in the ugly yellow and red suit is Spider-Man. Basically everyone hates the new costume which he’s been wearing for the past few months, and Marvel’s come out and said that he’ll be back in his classic duds before too long. Now, I do agree that giving him his “Iron Spidey” suit does help to show his tie to Iron Man, that Peter’s grateful for everything that Tony has done for him and all that. My guess (I’d bet money on it) is that in issue 5 or 6 of Civil War Spider-Man will break away from the pro-registration side, join up with Captain America, and put back on his classic costume. That would be a good, story-driven way to get him back into his traditional attire. If they don’t do that, I feel like five years down the road, whenever new people pick up and read the story, they’re going to say, “now why was Spider-Man wearing that awful costume?”, just like you do with the Superman Blue period.