In an issue devoted to the Western, The New York Times Magazine spotlights Platinum Studios’ Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and Cowboys & Aliens, and looks at the controversy surrounding the promotion of the comic:

If Rosenberg’s production model owes a lot to the movies, his promotional techniques also borrow freely. “We used outside-the-comic-book-market marketing strategies,” Rosenberg says. Those strategies involved making deals with retailers not unlike the ones “that a beverage maker would make with a supermarket.” This meant, among other things, offering “Cowboys & Aliens” at a highly discounted price, and giving some comics shops promotional budgets, with which they could discount the books further, or give them away. In its first week on the stands in October, “Cowboys & Aliens” flew to the top of Entertainment Weekly’s comic and graphic novel best-seller list.

Comics bloggers cried foul at what they saw as artificially manufactured hype. “Rosenberg,” wrote A. David Lewis, a comics commentator, “has pulled a fast one.” Entertainment Weekly issued a “clarification,” and the controversy soon died down. In the comics world, at least, so did the hype. Dirk Deppey, a blogger for The Comics Journal, wrote in an e-mail message that, “aside from the headlines generated by its marketing,” “Cowboys & Aliens” was “by and large ignored.”

Rosenberg shrugs off the criticism: “As far as we’re concerned, it’s more buzz.”

At the Fantagraphics blog, Eric Reynolds pans the profile — and Platinum — calling the article, “the worst kind of wag the dog journalism about comics that I can recall reading recently.”

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