Happy New Year!  Yes, in the warped world of comic book indicia, it's now January 2007.  And we all know what a new month means - a whole new set of adverts!

You can probably guess where this is heading, can't you?

In October 2005, Marvel shipped a month of comics containing a frankly outrageous quantity of adverts.  In some books, the adverts actually outnumbered the story in terms of page count.  Not surprisingly, there were complaints.  Adverts are distracting, quite intentionally.  They disrupt the flow of the story.  A certain amount can be screened out, but when the adverts outnumber the story pages, you've got a real problem in terms of readability.  The quality of the product is seriously compromised.

Marvel apologised, and cheerfully announced that it wouldn't be happening again the next month.  Of course, on a close reading, that was partly because they just didn't have as many advertisers lined up for next month.  But still, they acknowledged the problem.  They apologised to readers.  Joe Quesada ended up telling Newsarama that it wouldn't happen again. 

Now, if recent history is anything to go by, Marvel will probably deny that they ever said any such thing.  So, just for reference, here's the passages.

Joe Quesada, on 21 October 2005:-

"We're very aware of the problem, and we're going to rectify it.  ...  We've heard the fans and will make sure that their reading experience is the number one priority and not the ads.  They will be seeing short and long-term resolutions in the next couple of weeks."

Joe Quesada, on 11 November 2005:-

"We've been looking to resolve this as quickly as we can, which is why I'm proud to say that come December, all our books go back to their normal page counts.  And in the future, if we ever find ourselves in this sort of dilemma again, we will place the bulk of the ads towards the back of the books so as to interrupt the stories as little as possible."

I'll just repeat that last bit in case you didn't get it.

"In the future, if we ever find ourselves in this sort of dilemma again, we will place the bulk of the ads towards the back of the books so as to interrupt the stories as little as possible."

Well, once again we have a vast quantity of adverts this month, and it turns out Joe Quesada was not telling the truth.  No effort whatsoever has been made to group the adverts at the back of the book.  Not only that, but Marvel themselves have made the situation even worse.  This comic contains 23 pages of adverts between the first and last page of a 22 page story.  Of those adverts, one is a double-page house ad for Incredible Hulk, one is a full-page house ad for newuniversal, one is a half-page house ad for Iron Fist, and one is a half-page house ad for Bullet Points.  The half pagers may just about be forgivable, because they're needed to fill out the page due to the dimensions of the paid advertisements.  But three pages of house ads in the middle of a 22-page story already fit to burst with adverts?  A full spread house ad in a story that already contains no less than three double-spread paid ads?  Are they on crack?

Nobody could seriously argue that this story is unimpaired by the adverts.  Take, for example, page 15 of the story.  It's a big explosion that's meant to be a cool, dramatic moment.  But it's stranded miles away from any sort of context - the preceding two pages are adverts, and so are the next three.

Here's the thing.  Marvel acknowledged, just twelve months ago, that this was unacceptable.  They accepted that it damaged the quality of their product.  They claimed to have heard the complaints.  They said that if they had this many adverts again, they'd group them at the back.

Well, so much for Marvel's word.

And do you know, it's the strangest thing.  Because Marvel love quality.  They tell us so, every time one of their flagship titles is running several months late.  It's because something unexpected has come up, yet again, and Marvel is willing to stick with the creators, because they care so much about quality.

Heaven forfend anyone should suggest that Marvel has a chronic lateness problem because they indulge primadonnas who think their Jerry Bruckheimer story is Citizen Kane; artists who somehow find time to draw magazine covers when their regular title is six months late; and TV writers who put their TV work first and have no discernible intention of handing in their scripts on anything remotely resembling a deadline.  Heaven forfend anyone suggest that Marvel's scheduling department appears to consist of six monkeys and a dartboard, and that the company persistently announces comics on schedules that it knows full well will never be achieved.  Dear me, no.  It's all because the unexpected continues to occur with clockwork regularity, and Marvel care so terribly much about quality.

Well, if Marvel truly care that much about quality, why are they shipping comics with 23 pages of adverts in 22 story pages, something that they've previously acknowledged is unacceptably damaging to the product?  Why didn't they keep to their word and put the adverts at the back of the book?  Why didn't they just turn some of the adverts down?  Come on, you're always telling us how you're willing to sacrifice short term profit when it comes to indulging your big name primadonnas!  Where's the same effort when it comes to the adverts?  You people do realise that at the end of the day, paying customers are supposed to read these bloody things?

I'm not a happy customer.  I'm a seriously angry customer.

Of course, it could be worse.  You could be reading Ant-Man #2.  That book contains a 22 page story interpolated with 25 pages of adverts - and since that apparently isn't bad enough, they've chucked in the letter column to make it 26.  So the adverts outnumber the story pages by 18%.

Look me in the eye, Joe, and tell me this is acceptable.

Anyway.  Let's look, briefly, at X-Men: Phoenix - Warsong #3, because both of this week's X-books are in mid storyline, but this one at least contains a major plot point.  Unfortunately, it's a silly one.

It's fairly plain by this point that Warsong is really just the origin story of the Stepford Cuckoos, and any notion of it being a Phoenix story is fairly peripheral.  Still, the Stepford Cuckoos have been around long enough for their origin to be a point of legitimate interest, and writer Greg Pak earned some brownie points at the outset by sticking with Grant Morrison's hints that they were something to do with Weapon Plus.  (Because, after all, we do want readers to assume that the details mean something, right?)

Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there.  The idea turns out to be that they're clones of Emma Frost, produced by the Weapon Plus project and sent to infiltrate the X-Men.  In itself, this might just about be workable - silly as it is, they were clearly designed to look like mini-Emmas.  But it gets worse; the Cuckoos are just five out of thousands of teenage Emmaclones.  God help us.

Why do people still write stories like this?  Has there ever been a story with the "thousands of clones of the lead character" device which didn't suck in every way imaginable?  It's silly, it's implausible, it's too absurd to carry any dramatic weight, and god help us, the book is trying to take it seriously.  Greg Pak seems to get lumbered with a lot of miniseries in which he wrestles with an unpromising editorial edict.  I seriously hope this wasn't his idea, because we've seen in the past that he's capable of much better.

Oh, and if you want to nitpick, Emma Frost isn't a natural blonde, so all those dormant clones should actually be brunettes.  It's, you know, a character point that was sort of a big deal in the Emma Frost solo series.  Just saying.  It wouldn't make the story any better, but it'd be nice to think somebody was keeping track.  Meanwhile, Tyler Kirkham's art understandably struggles to compete for attention with the adverts, but isn't especially good to start with.  It tells the story, but that's about it.

A mediocre story, ineptly packaged.  Pak can do much better than this.

Rating: C-

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