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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

What Do You Do When Previews Spoils Your Story?

edit: Spoilers for Green Lantern: Blackest Night :-)


Okay, you can use creative solicitation copy and blacked-out images to protect your comic book's secrets...

But what about action figure solicitations?

I'm not familiar with current Green Lantern lore to care one way or another, but obviously the fans consider these images from Previews to contain important information.

This reminds me, in some tangential way, of when the Star Trek III paperback came out before the movie, and I simply read it to find out all the spoilers about Spock. Synergy? Not quite.

"Whoa Superman of Earth 2 looks like Kilowog."

Yeah, that's what I thought. But it's just that his face is messed up, right? Sort of like this guy:

16 comments:

  1. I noticed this myself, and I'm pissed off about it. I Twittered as much, but got little sympathy.

    You can avoid spoilers on the net, most of the time, but I walked right into this one.

    Dirty Pool, Previews.

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  2. Anonymous8:07 PM

    Hi.

    And thanks for posting the SPOILER PICTURES RIGHT ON THE TOP!!!

    Bah...

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  3. If a fan's gonna keep up with the news--even by doing as little as reading the headlines--he's gonna get spoiled. No point in getting pissed about it.

    And if a fan's gonna keep up with blogs like yours, he doesn't have a prayer of avoiding spoilers.

    But that's the choice we make. We choose to read the news and the solicitations and the blogs. For some reason, we simply must go into the shop on Wednesday knowing exactly what we're looking for. I wonder what it would be like going into the shop every Wednesday and being surprised.

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  4. I follow GL, and consider these pretty minor as spoilers go. BTW DC's online solicits and DC Direct's site have the images blacked out, that's where I first saw them.

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  5. Anonymous7:44 AM

    hahahahahahahahaha. Who cares?

    Comics geeks are as comic geeks shall be. We'll all still read it regardless if we find out who a few of the 'black lanterns' are?

    If anything, this reveal just adds to the marketing buzz. The real juice of this story seems to be how and why the Blk lanterns exist and not necessarily who they might be.

    If these types of reveals ruin it for some readers then those types of readers will be easily disappointed anyway. This isn't like FC #6 coming out prior to Legion of 3 worlds and Superman beyond #2. (which makes me wonder if DC will screw up the scheduling for BLK'est Night?).

    Kryb looks freaking awesome. I wonder if it comes with little babies stuck in it's back?

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  6. Haha this was in fact spoiled for me by you! What do you do when Blogs spoil your story is the real question! Not that I mind. Anyhow, I like the GL events! So I am looking forward.

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  7. While we were pretty much aware of both Manhunter and Superman probably being Black Lanterns, their appearance is a spoiler. We hadn't seen what a Black Lantern would look like until now. Kinda ruined the anticipation; I wonder if Previews knows what they're doing with this? They did the same thing with Superboy-Prime.

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  8. J'onn is back as a zombie? Great.

    This is me vomiting with rage.

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  9. I hereby will refer to Earth-2 Superman as "Arseface Superman".

    Otherwise, big deal. It's all about the story. You gonna complain if you see the cover before you read the story? Ideas are cool, but they must be properly communicated.

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  10. These seem to be very minor spoilers, unless I am missing something. It has basically been known that the black lantern corp would be comprised of deceased characters. Superman of Earth 2 is an interesting choice.

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  11. Oh! That's John in the second picture. Couldn't tell. Well, that ain't so great.

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  12. At least now we know why there's been so much focus on death and destruction in DC in the last few years...it's not to drive sales, it's an artistic decision to increase membership in the Black Lantern Corps! How synergistic! Well-played, DC.

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  13. How many evil versions of Superman does that make now? Must be in double figures, surely?

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  14. I didn't care before and I REALLY don't care now. I'll stick with Marvel Zombies for my "undead superguy" needs...especially with the Morbius-led team of zombie-hunters in the upcoming Marvel Zombies 4.

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  15. Well, at least they didn't spoil anything by showing an image of Black Lantern Batman/Bruce Wayne.

    At least Spoiler's been revealed to be alive; a Black Lantern Spoiler would've been messed up. But does that mean we'll be seeing a Black Lantern Elongated Man? Or a Black Lantern Katma Tui (who was John Stewart's wife for a time before she was killed by Christopher Priest (nee James Owsley) and Star Sapphire)? And if there's a Black Lantern J'onn Jonn'zz (sic?) could there be a bunch of Black Lantern Martians threatening the DC Universe? Or Black Lantern Kryptonians?

    This geek is certainly wanting to see more...

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  16. While it's considerate that you put that spoiler warning at the top of your post, it's not going to prevent anyone from seeing the images. Could you please remove them, or if you want to keep some images there, just replace them with the blacked out versions? There are actually some people that haven't been spoilered yet... I used to be one before reading this. :(

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