Event Marketing vs. - gasp- Actual Stories

So its come to this has it? The Event loving chickens have come home to roost and sales are down at retailers for 18 months straight and suddenly the retailers and publishers are wondering where the readers have gone. And they both have different ideas of who to blame.

Johanna Carlson comes in with a short but succinct post about it, comparing quotes from Brian hibbs and marvel's Tom Breevort concerning cutting back the publishing line, since Brian believes that it is just such a glut of overlapping titles that has sapped the will of the consumer to buy. The Robot 6 post puts the two of them head to head.

Now, I know that i'm not the average superhero consumer. Quite the opposite it seems, since i tend to despise the event marketing and feel that it simply disrupts the actual writing of good stories, since there is so much crap that each issue has to do to make sure that it links in with the other issues properly. And, as we all know, they NEVER interlink properly.

So i've been buying Thor and Fantastic Four AS LONG AS THEY DON'T INTERLINK WITH THE REST OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE. And because there were some interesting stories going down there. But now I'm seeing multiple Thor books and FF appearsl to be coming out sporadically and Marvel is, once again, pissing me off. So yes, the local retailer is going to have a harder time getting my money because they are once again making my life difficult.

Why is it that hard? Because nothing succeeds like copying success, and if the event strategy has worked in the past, you're not going to convince the heads up at marvel with their sales charts not to do it again, despite the general blog-o-sphere showing that the public is tired of the events. Companies, constantly looking ahead by checking out the past are notoriously bad at taking the temperture of the general public. otherwise we wouldn't have seem so many Disco albums released after 1980. Or so many Secret Wars after the wars were no longer... um... secret.

So here's the deal guys: I don't quite believe in Brian's hypothesis that the event marketing has conditioned me to ignore titles that weren't part of the cross over, it has done the opposite. It has made me want to only look at titles that weren't part of the crossovers. But he's right in that the missing ingredient in comics right now is that they're not giving me my series heroin: a series so good that i'm there for it each and every damn month and if I don't get it I'll explode. And while Tom is busy asserting that sale don't aggregate if you were to consolidate the different Spider Man (and I'm sure that he has the data to back it up), i wish that he would answer the other unspoken question of whether or not sales would go up if you had a dedicated writer and artist creating a better product rather than a product noted for simply interlocking. Or a comic noted for being a great read rather than a comic noted for crossing over to other cross overs.

Either way, in a shitty economy, you're lost readers and that's never good.

Ever.