This week’s Dumb Comics Controversy is brought to you by people who don’t know comics are supposed to make money.
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Get ready to be shocked — SHOCKED, I TELL YOU — that DC Comics is actually putting half-page ads in comics this month — ON THE SAME PAGE AS THE ART!
Comics will never be the same! ADS ON ART PAGES. The PAIN! The PAIN!
I’m more offended that it has to be Nick Lachey.
Hate to break it to you but the industry (industry=business, by the way) did this for decades.
One tiny example:
Here’s one of the most dramatic and famous sequences in Batman history, when he takes out Ra’s al Ghul near the end of Batman #244 — in 1972. Beautiful sequence written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams — two living legends. These seminal pages cemented the Batman-Ra’s-Talia triangle that exists to this very day.
And now, check out the page turn …
Wow.
And get this — the bottom of the page is a house ad — which was either by design or because DC couldn’t sell the space to Sea Monkeys or whatever that month.
Now, would I have preferred this to be a full-page moment? Of course. (In fact it was extended into a full-page image at least once when reprinted.)
But this notion that DC and Twix are heralding the Comic Book Apocalypse — brought to you by websites that sell ads — is utterly, categorically, absurd.
Do I like it? No. Do I understand it? Yes.
Comics are a commercial enterprise — and have been for more than 75 years.
May 31, 2015
If this delays yet another price hike in the books themselves, I’m all for it.
June 5, 2015
Other comics have handled ads better in their books than DC. I think it just interrupts the flow of a story when I see an F-List celeb selling candy hardly anyone eats. When I read top to bottom, I want story, not ads. They did fine with full page ads for a long time. Why mess with something that’s not broken? Then again, comics tend to do that with their own characters all the time so there’s that.