Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics, Preview | Tagged: journalistic untegrity, marvel, previews

No Marvel Previews This Week? What Are They Hiding?

Published Sat, 01 Jun 2019 12:00:33 -0500

It's the weekend, which usually means several very important things. For people who haven't dedicated their lives to the never-ending, soul-sucking churn of comics "journalism," it's a time to relax, to leave work behind and enjoy life before getting back to the daily grind. But for elite comic book "journalists" like myself, the 24-hour comics news cycle never stop spinning. Stories must be written. Clicks must be baited. But that job is a little bit harder this weekend because one other important truth about weekends has been upended this week. There are no Marvel Previews.

Usually, Marvel ships out all the majority of their previews in a single blast to compliant media partner websites, of which Bleeding Cool is not one. Then a few individual previews are passed out to Marvel's extra favoritest compliant media partner websites as EX-X-XCLUSIVES. Adventures in Poor Taste usually gets one. AV Club gets one. Multiversity gets one. The Beat gets one or two. Sometimes a few others do as well.

And then, and this is the important part, your pal Jude Terror gathers all of the previews from PreviewsWorld or their EX-X-XCLUSIVE locations, reads them all, and then creates clickbait headlines out of their content. On a good week, this can account for 30-40% of my clickbait article quota, while doing pretty well in terms of clicks as well thanks to those headlines. And that's important, because access to quick, reliable clickbait article material is integral toward being able to spend extra time on longer pursuits, such as X-ual Healing, the Weekly X-Men Recap Column, which usually runs about 3,000 words and takes hours to put together… even though it earns me the same rate as this article right here does.

It's all about balance, is what I'm saying, and right now, Marvel has upset that balance by not releasing their previews. The question is: why? What is Marvel hiding amongst next week's comics that they don't want us to see? Does Matthew Rosenberg kill off another character in Uncanny X-Men #19? Does Thor turn into a woman again in War of the Realms #5? Will all of Marvel's heroes for the past two decades be revealed to be imposters in the conclusion of Meet the Skrulls, kicking off Secret Invasion II? Does Cosmic Ghost Rider really Destroy the Marvel Universe?

Sadly, thanks to the ineptitude, laziness, or disorganization of Marvel's marketing department this week, we may never know… until Wednesday. Or Monday if they put the previews out then. Even worse, I'm going to have to really stretch to come up with stories for this weekend. Have we talked about the Snyder Cut lately? Interested in more wrestling posts, dear readers? What's Eva Marie up to?

Look, Marvel, nobody likes it when you rock the boat. Previews come out on the weekend. That's the covenant you've made with your compliant media partner websites. And the vow we've made here at Bleeding Cool to steal that payola for ourselves.

That's how it's always worked. Don't go changing it up now. Hopefully, things return to some semblance of normalcy next week, or the world of comic book "journalism" will never be the same!