Comic Book Resources

I think Wolverine should get a pet wolverine that bites peoples nuts off. That would be so precious!!!

BARF!

Ok, sure Wolvie has two ongoings, not counting Dark Wolverine, plus X-men, X-force, and New Avengers. But to me Deadpool is the one who is getting WAY overexposed.

Brevoort talks about Wolverine as though he’s a toy with a large but short-term demand for him. There might be, say, 40,000 readers with an insatiable appetite for Wolverine stories, 30,000 more who will buy team books that he appears in, but won’t drop titles because of his unwanted appearances, and 5,000 more who will avoid issues that feature him. Unless Marvel does market studies, they won’t know how large the groups are until the market for stories with Wolverine collapses. The demand for UXM has fluctuated over the past year; only 65,758 copies of UXM #520 were sold.

In the same Q&A — http://marvel.com/blogs/Tom_Brevoort/entry/1736 –, Brevoort responded to a question re Doctor Doom with:

It’s that old chestnut about consistency rather than continuity. At the moment, Doom is appearing a a lot of places, largely because every book wants to put their guys up against big villains, and Doom’s been off the table for awhile. That said, as long as there’s a consistency when it comes to the depiction of Doom, I’m not all that worried about getting anal about which appearance comes first, except in a general way. I leave that sort of calculation to the fans and the Handbook writers these days.

It’s impossible to take Brevoort’s statements re job responsibilities and professionalism seriously when he doesn’t care whether the stories he publishes actually work in ways that satisfy readers older than, say, ten. Just pump out the books with the cartoon villains as fast as they can, and if the stories don’t make sense, then the “anal” fans and writers can calculate and complain.

SRS

Help! I’m trapped in my LCS and being forced to buy wolverine comics that I don’t want to!

Or, well, maybe not… but all those wolverine comics are keeping me from buying what I do want to!

Or, um, well, maybe not…

I guess I’m doing ok, actually.

Brevoort’s answer is disingenious, if the Direct Market was such an “extremely democratic entity” then wouldn’t say the declining sales of the Spider-man books since BND have editorial working to undo that particular storyline?

I actually agree with Tom. Having worked for a comic store for 7 years I can agree with his numbers. If people didn’t pick up a book we reduced our orders. Simple. I actually like Wolverine tremendously and don’t think he is overused. There are some bad stories with him in it but, I think that has more to do with writers not knowing what to do with him except drink beer, growl and snikt!

Deadpool is the most overused character in the Marvel Universe right now. Deadpool Corps. Really? He needs to go away in a bad way.

Deadpool is being twice as overused as Wolverine. I haven’t heard of a character having 4 ongoings starring only him (Wolverine is a secondary character in most of his titles), plus DP has some miniseries coming out, numerous guest appearences and is appearing on the covers of comics he’s not even in!

Its so bad one comic shop I go to stopped ordering DP BECAUSE he was selling too well. Their store got mobbed every wednesday around noon for DP comics.

Good on Tom Brevoort for telling it the way it is!

To paraphrase: “You get the comics industry you deserve.”