Dear Marvel Comics

Hi. My name’s Rob, and I’m a lifelong fan of your work. My comic addiction started with Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up in 1976, and continues to this day. Your books have entertained and inspired me even though they prevented me from getting laid until I was twenty years old. Which, strangely, is a sparkling endorsement of your stuff; I guarantee you that if watching crime movies made girls think you were a freak, Quentin Tarantino would be quoting Kurosawa dialog for nickels on a South Central street corner right now.

Anyway, as much as I love your books, I feel duty-bound to tell you about a disturbing trend I’ve noticed in your books over the past few weeks: double-page spread advertisements.

Now, I don’t begrudge the fact that you need to make money on your books, and I love them enough to generally overlook the fact that apparently you can’t make a profit on a thirty-page monthly magazine that costs only a buck less than Rolling Stone, which is twice the size with four times as many pages, yet somehow nets Jann Wenner enough to keep him stocked with blow and confused young men.

However, in a comic book, a double-page spread ad means a complete break in the story. It sucks you completely out of the experience while you turn a second page to get back to the story. It’s like the film breaking at a movie, or an Emergency Alert System test in the middle of a TV show, or your sex partner asking you to hold up for a minute while she changes out her colostomy bag.

Again: I understand that you need to sell ads like these in order to turn a profit, even though DC Comics somehow found the wherewithall to split the Fox Fringe / Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles spread into two seperate pages so I could at least get a page of story in between them (Don’t get me wrong; I’m not playing favorites here. DC has it’s own advertising problems. Like the U.S. Navy enlistment cards stuck into all their books for the past month, as if reading Death of the New Gods would somehow make me want to run out and join the Navy Seals… or like the Navy would even accept me if I, for some reason, did. “Hey Ahmed… how come that bush is smoking? And should plant life wheeze like that?”).

However Marvel Comics, I’m noticing that, for the past month, you’ve been throwing in double page spreads advertising your own comic books, like the Secret Invasion ad pictured above. This abomination of a story interruption I am not willing to let slide.

Let’s face reality, Marvel: you can’t buy comics at the newsstand or the drugstore anymore. To get a comic book, you need to go out of your way and find and go to a specialty comic book store. And the type of person who is likely to take such action is, more than likely, a comic book fan, and is therefore more than likely aware of Secret Invasion, since it is your massive summer crossover storyline. Advertising it is like stamping “Try Smack!” on a bag of Mexican Brown; we’re sold already.

People like us are loyal customers, Marvel Comics, if not raving fanatics over your stories. And we don’t like having those stories interrupted by shameless self-promotion. Particularly when the story that we are reading when we see this intrusive advertisement for Secret Invasion… is Secret Fucking Invasion.

To paraphrase Tom Hagen from The Godfather: Please consider this a favor, and by the way I enjoy your books very much. Now stop this shit posthaste before you wake up and find Robert Downey Jr.’s head in your bed.

[tags]Marvel Comics, Secret Invasion, comic books, advertisement, dark humor, satire[/tags]