Awaiting Midnight (Marvel)
Clocking the hype around Midnight Marvel: Ultimate Horror or Ultimate Ho-hum?
Scary season is finally here, and this year everyone seems to be rising to the occasion.
This month, Marvel will debut its new horror-themed line, Midnight Marvel, a follow-up to its Ultimate Universe line. It's another entry-level take on classic characters like Spider-Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four, this time trading gritty realism for a superhero/horror mashup version of Marvel.
I can't stop wondering how the comics community will judge Midnight Marvel alongside plenty of high-quality horror comics on shop shelves and increased activity from the collector crowd. Publishers are now borrowing tactics from trading card games for every new event crossover launch; will this displace "quality storyline" as the main draw?
Major comics publishers are increasingly building strategies for launching new series with commanding sales via "blind bags" – polybagged versions of a new comic issue or event with the chance of getting a rare variant cover. The move targets the frothy, underserved collector market, which isn't a bad thing. The bagged-comics trend has increased sales overall for publishers, foot traffic at local shops, and general interest from readers across the comics industry.
I clocked about six such instances from Marvel (Ultimate Endgame, Daredevil, Queen In Black, DoomQuest, DNX #1, and Avengers Armageddon). DC Comics has been far more measured, while Image, BOOM!, and other smaller publishers like Dynamite are just ramping up.
The fear, with Midnight Marvel and other such blind-bagged stories, is that story quality will become an afterthought, that a weak plot will be forgivable if the cover art is serviceable. As blind bags become a normal component of major events, will the resultant inflated sales numbers overshadow everything else?
