Twice this year, developments in long-running serialized superhero comics I’ve enjoyed for years were spoiled for me before I had a chance to read them, not by spoilers themselves, but simply through the existence of spoiler warnings about them. With some comics, the number of potential plot twists that the comics Internet would deem both newsworthy and worthy of tagging with spoiler warnings is limited enough that you can guess exactly what they’re talking about simply based on the fact that they’re talking about something.

Of the two, one was a full-fledged “A shocking issue of so-and-so hits stands Wednesday” spoiler-warning-tagged PR blitz promulgated by the publisher a couple days in advance of the issue’s release. That one pissed me off, because it diluted the impact of the story itself, a story that really, really, really, really, really should have been allowed to unfold in its readers’ minds on its own terms. It was, quite literally, the moment the series had been building toward for years, and of all people, the publisher and its representatives should have realized how important it was not to monkey with that for the sake of a sales boost.

The second was just a bunch of people reading the issue the morning it came out and posting about it, and other people complaining that those people had posted about it. This one didn’t bother me so much. First of all, it wasn’t the publisher’s fault. Secondly, the development that the “watch out for spoilers!” talk spoiled through its very existence was, basically, the undoing by a character’s usual creative team of a pretty poorly handled storyline involving that character by a separate creative team. In other words, the twist wasn’t something that emerged from a story I’d been following and enjoying, and thus having it spoiled didn’t ruin my enjoyment — the spoiler was basically an announcement that the story I’d been enjoying until it was kind of ruined by that other creative team was back on track.

Tags: comics

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2011 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.