C IS FOR COMMENTARY: MIGHTY THOR’S name game

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Josh Crawley

by Josh Crawley

Before I get into the heart of this week’s column, I’d like to take a moment to touch on an announcement made yesterday. “…Image central will work a lot more directly with Marc Silvestri’s  top Cow productions and will be managing lots of crucial operations.” As part of that arrangement, there’s a terrific and amazing marketing/PR gal out there named Christine Dinh that some intelligent company — preferably a comic book publisher — must be sure to snap up soon; before your competition does.

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Mighty Thor #1

Yesterday, marvel announced a “new” Thor title: Mighty Thor. Why did I put new in quotes? I’m glad you asked.

Same writer? Check. same artist that launched this a lot of recent publishing incarnation? Check. current artist will be back for the next story arc? Check.

Oh, I get it now. There’s a motion picture coming out, and it’s an easy place to start reading about the character.

Whatever.

Before I go any further, please keep in mind I have no issues with the creative team (Matt Fraction, Olivier Coipel, Pascal Ferry, and the rest).

If you want to make a book much easier for someone to get into, playing the name game (and the number game, at times) does not make it much easier to sell the product. “Thor volume 3 #12 leads into Thor volume 1 #600, which used to be titled journey into mystery until issue 126,” was bad enough, but it somewhat streamlined things. Now, though, we also get the happiness of telling (hopefully) new customers “And that led into Mighty Thor #1 — which is by the same person and continues his ongoing story — and Thor volume 1 went back to being called journey into Mystery, which is being written by the person who wrote Thor before the current person started writing Thor, but his two graphic novel collections look nothing alike.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll describe it to people. However, I won’t blame them if they leave without getting anything because someone made a decision to play an annoying game of labyrinthine musical titles.

Journey into mystery #622

Things like this also lead to lame naming and numbering conventions — or lack thereof — when it pertains to graphic novel collections. three volumes of the J. Michael Straczynski run are numbered, the following volume by Kieron Gillen has matching trade dress to the Straczynski volumes, but the volume after is a Siege tie-in volume, so not only are there no numbers, they don’t match very well on a shelf. That, and the fact that it’s a Thor book is played down in favor of promoting a huge event. That’s a good way to convince some people the book doesn’t matter enough to keep reading.

I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to be like two months from now when they decide — I’m just guessing here — to relaunch a new Captain America book (for Steve Rogers, I presume) but bring back Tales of Suspense (for Bucky Barnes) with its original numbering just to confuse things more; especially if they bring back Captain America Comics, too.

“New” titles like this also skew awards. In 2008, the new Thor title won an Eagle award for much-loved new Comicbook. As a newly launched book for a character that hadn’t a title in a while, I was fine with that (unlike just adding another title of a character that’s had an in-continuity series or a lot more for ages, like Invincible Iron Man). The numbering reverting kind of changed that new title back into an old title, though. Now, apparently, this “new” title will be eligible for all sorts of “new” award categories, even though it has the same writer it had for issues. In all fairness, though, this is a shortfall of awards rules, but it helps point out the general absurdity, I think.

Some people may claim customers get off-put by series with high volume numbers. I’d be a bit a lot more open to that theory if Sandman graphic novels didn’t sell so well.

Keep in mind; I’m not just blaming marvel for stuff like this. I’m afraid to even get into the mess that is the Bat-Family of books.

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That’s it for this week. Also, be sure to check out the Doughnuts and top Cow podcast — now conveniently located on iTunes —  co-hosted by me; lots of thanks to Derek Coward and the entire Comic book noise Family!

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Josh Crawley may or may not be the keyboardist for Everclear. He strongly suggests you not bet that he is.