The Four Color Media Monitor

The Beat blog publishes excerpts from Diamond Daily, which isn't available online, where Marvel's marketing vice president, David Gabriel, where he brings up the issue of company-wide events, though I'm not sure this signals anything good:

I really think there is no event fatigue. When we hear that here in the office, we all sit back and say there isn’t event fatigue; there’s extended, prolonged story fatigue. That’s what nobody wants.

But still, the fans are still going crazy over stuff like bannering books and sticking crossover labels on things. We also love that, as fanboys. We all love seeing stuff like the Utopia banner on a bunch of books. I’ll even give a shout-out to Blackest Night’s bannering. But I think we realized towards the latter part of Secret Invasion that sometimes [the story] is too long. It’s just too long.

We’re going to try to get in and out now, hopefully within four issues. The editorial idea is that everything is going to be big and fast.

Siege's main story may be just 4 issues, but even that's a bit much by now. Another problem is if they're still going to go by the Quesada-mandated status quos - no marriage for Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker, an unimaginative direction for the Avengers, not to mention the jaw-dropping lack of continuity coherence in all their universe.

Gabriel may be signaling that they realize that they've gone overboard with crossovers by now (and the dropping sales should be a strong indicator of that), even as he denies there's any event fatigue, but then, that's why they're going to have to grind it to a halt very soon, and do what they can to repair all the damage they've done to continuity and characterization over the past decade. Especially if they ever want to win back the audience they drove away.

Labels: bad editors, crossoverloading, marvel comics