The great Marvel Flashpoint cover cut up controversy

Marvel and DC, the big two in the comics industry were always friendly rivals. Note the past tense.
When Joe Quesada rose to the position of Editor-in-chief at Marvel the friendly part faded away. Pot shots became common and the hope of joint crossovers like they did in the eights and nineties became a thing of the past.
The biggest shot in the rivalry was fired last year.  At the time both companies were in the middle of big cross over events. DC had Blackest Night and Marvel had Siege. Both were selling well, but Blackest Night was getting better press. Marvel had a unique response.
Marvel made an offer to comic shops. Rip of the covers off of 50 Blackest Night tie in books and send them in and Marvel would send you a special variant cover of Siege #3.
Yes you read that right.
Destroy $150.00 worth of our competitor’s product and we will send you a copy of one of ours with a special cover.
Yeah I don’t think Douchebag is too strong a word here.
The claim was that they were helping retailers get a return on unsold books, which is odd because you were not finding unsold Blackest Night books.
Marvel claims they received tens of thousands of covers. I never heard of any store taking up the offer. A search of EBay does not turn up any copies of the variant for sale. So it was a mean spirited ploy that got Marvel a lot of scorn and no real return.
DC took the high road and largely ignored the whole thing. The only response I ever heard were some jokes made by the DC staff at Emerald City Comic-con that year.
Really that should have been the end of it. But Marvel must have liked the press, because they are doing it again.
Right now Marvel has an event going on called Fear Itself. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of it. It’s not getting much buzz. It is basically Marvel getting around to ripping off the plot of Blackest Night. DC has Flashpoint.  This event is getting plenty of buzz as it is the lead in to the September relaunch.
So naturally Marvel felt that history needed to be repeated.
For every 50 covers of Flashpoint books retailers rip off and send in, Marvel will send a variant cover copy of Fear Itself #6. Once again they claim it is to help out retailers in these tough economic times.
It strikes me as a desperate grab for press. DC has been overshadowing Marvel in the press with the upcoming relaunch. Sure Marvel has their movies, but in the end they are a comic book company and losing the limelight to DC must be intolerable.
It would be nice if they could find a way to do it without acting like jackasses.

The Decline of Marvel Comcs – Why Joe, Why?

Right now I think that Marvel is really nailing it with their movie franchises, at least the ones they control directly. Sadly I do not feel the same about the actual comic books.
Over the last few years I have found myself dropping a lot of the Marvel comics I use to collect. I can think of a lot of factors that went into this but right now I want to look at the top. And by that I mean former Editor-in-chief and current Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada.
Under Quesada’s time as Editor-in-chief you had the mutant population largely wiped out, a civil war between the superheroes that was won by the side depicted as the bad guys, the Green Goblin becoming the head of S.H.E.I.L.D, Daredevil became a talking heads book, the Marvel U overall went from a superhero universe to a crapsack world that happened to have superheroes in it, and of course Spider-man made a deal with the Devil to save his aunt that reconned out his marriage.
What the hell?
Quesada has stated that the Spider-marriage had to go because he felt it aged Spider-man and limited the stories. I have heard that the mutant depopulation was due to him not liking the increase in mutants because that was not the old depiction. In other words he holds the late 70’s/early 80’s Marvel as his model and doesn’t want to stray too far from it.
And maybe that isn’t fair, but looking at what he has done, and reading stories he has written I think I have found the root of the problem. Joe Quesada is a terrible writer. If you read the last issue of One More Day that he wrote after J Michael Straczynski jumped ship at the end, or it’s follow up, One Moment in Time, you can see that he is writing to fulfill his plot but he doesn’t care much for character continuity and uses senseless plot contrivances to get where we wants to go. Really at his best he is a hack.
Basically he is an artist and really a good one. This isn’t to say artists can’t be good storytellers, both Eric Larsen and Jeff Smith have proven that they can. But Quesada has proven that he isn’t.
I also think as Editor-in-chief he did not do a good job of guiding the writers. Basically he would let them all do what they wanted with no concern towards continuity, which in a shared universe is poison. I think this more than anything else has led to me general dissatisfaction with Marvel.
I know that Quesada is no longer Editor-in-Chief, but as Chief Creative Officer he still basically dictates the direction of the Marvel universe so I don’t see anything improving anytime soon.
As I said at the top there were a lot of factors that led to this and while I think the buck stops with Quesada I think there are others responsible as well. Trust me we will be looking at them too.