29
Prelude to Number Crunching: A Heroic Skyline Reused
While working on another sales analysis post, I started writing a brief aside about Marvel’s Heroic Age Pedestal Variant Covers. You’ve probably seen them, they all follow the same template:
I had thought that the source of the template had been discussed in the blogosphere, and was going to link to it. But when I went looking I couldn’t find it. So here: it’s Mark Buckingham’s cover to Spectacular Spider-Man #27, the final issue of the last run that title got.
The initial solicitations didn’t even bother photoshopping out all of Buckingham/Spidey’s webbing:
At least they fixed that by press time.
My intent is not to rake Marvel over the coals or otherwise shame them; they’re only “swiping” from an earlier cover they had previously commissioned, and hopefully threw Buckingham a couple bucks for his inadvertent design work.
Great, now I can link to this tomorrow. A tip of the hat to David Brothers, who definitely chatted with me about this back when Marvel’s May solicitations were released.
[...] further below 50,000. By its final Jenkins/Buckingham reunion issue (#27, April 2005, recycled for those Heroic Age Pedestal covers) sales had dropped to 45,000 copies, the lowest a mainline Spider-Man book had been this [...]
Wow, that’s lazy. maybe.
For the life of me, I can not figure out what the ‘Heroic Age’ is supposed to be. It’s not a story line or an event, but it just seems to be another empty promise. THey aren’t even promising readers a big event this time. Is it supposed tobe about atmosphere, becuause I read the reviews of the Kaine in the Spider-man books being impaled for his blood. Sounds like sunshine to me.
Incidently, talking about Spectacular Spider-man I read that thing for the last couple years of its publicatoin. Now, that was Spider-man. It was a fun book and when it was sad it was for a reason. I don’t think Marvel really cares about doing decent stories anymore. It hasn’t for a quite a while.