Tag Archive for: Marketing

I was a little excited when I sent in my angry letter about Comic-Con to Entertainment Weekly on the 2nd because I received an email back from an editor saying that they were considering printing my letter in the “Feedback” section of their 1116/1117 issue and needed to verify the spelling of my name and address.  I was less excited when I received their current issue in the mail yesterday to discover that they didn’t print ANY “Feedback” in this double-sized issue.  Because when you have the room for twice your usual content, the first thing you jettison are the thoughts and opinions of your readers and subscribers.

I asked in my angry email to Entertainment Weekly (as noted in my Twitter feed this morning).  We’ll see if they actually print it.  The entirety of my “letter” is as follows:

Regarding your coverage of this year’s Comic-Con, until the organizers finally get around to changing the name to the much-more-appropriate “PopCon” or “MarketingCon”, could you at least expand your San Diego Comic-Con coverage to add some information on, you know, actual comics?  Yes, you covered Green Lantern, Thor, and Smallville, but where was any coverage on the actual comics on which those were based?  Despite being perplexed why shows like Community and Sons of Anarchy are even showcased at a genre-based convention, Comic-Con is still popular for those of us who eschew Hall H and Ballroom 20 because some of the most fascinating things go on in panels on the other side of the building (e.g., Berkeley Breathed discussing sources of inspiration or Grant Morrison talking about the kinkier parts of Batman’s 75 year history).  Your title is Entertainment Weekly but you seem to forget that some of us are still quite entertained, weekly, by the wonderful characters and worlds that come out of a century-old medium composed of sequential art panels telling good stories (or as professor Henry Jenkins put it in one woefully under-attended panel “comics are the R&D branch of the entertainment industry.”)

(additional links are all mine, because if you’re not going to hyper-annotate your blog, why bother?)