If you were anywhere near the Internet last week, you undoubtedly read about “marvel b0y,” who appeared to have been a disgruntled low-level Marvel employee determined to reveal spoiler-ish tidbits in between complaints about writers and editors and his menial duties.

On Friday evening, marvel b0y dropped a handful of seemingly inconsequential spoilers before signing off for the weekend. However, that post spawned a comments thread in which someone anonymously revealed what may be a half-dozen major plot points for Marvel’s Secret Invasion. (I won’t post them here. With a little Google-Fu, I’m sure you can find them.)

By early Saturday, though, marvel b0y’s blog had been deleted — something, perhaps, that writer Brian Michael Bendis had hinted at the day before: “… please, do not pay the troll any mind and it will all be resolved, hopefully, over the weekend. the hounds have been unleashed!”

His blog may be gone, but questions certainly remain. Foremost, of course, is whether marvel b0y was the real deal, or simply Marvel’s attempt at some rather bizarre viral marketing.

This morning Heidi MacDonald points to a February blog post from Tom Brevoort in which he refers to “some of the bizarre and probably ill-considered new concepts” Marvel will be “throwing out” in the coming weeks and months: “They may be stupid, or childish, or idiotic — but they won’t be boring!”

The postings of marvel b0y are certainly bizarre. Stupid, childish and ill-considered, too. But I don’t think Brevoort was referring to marvel b0y or, necessarily, marketing.

At the risk of facing a chorus of Nelson Muntz-like “Ha-ha”s down the road, I’ll say that I don’t think marvel b0y was a hoax. His “spoilers” all may not pan out — Ed Brubaker has already said the Captain America-related tidbits were wrong — but as difficult as it is to believe, marvel b0y may be exactly what he appeared: someone who found that his “dream job” at a comics publisher actually involved endless hours of photocopying, and exclusion from those “cool” planning meetings. (Or else, he’s a friend of the guy with the “dream job.”)

How do I come to this conclusion? First, there was the tone of marvel b0y’s posts, which went well beyond “we gotta make this believable”; they were downright resentful. If they were of the “Brian Bendis sure is bald” or “Tom Brevoort talks way too much” variety, I’d be the first to call shenanigans. But they weren’t.

Second, for a viral campaign, this wasn’t very “viral.” The writer whose project had the most to gain from the supposed marketing — Bendis — banned marvel b0y from his message board, and then didn’t link to the blog when he publicly addressed it. Likewise, Matt Fraction refused to link to the blog after it revealed a minor spoiler for Invincible Iron Man #2. (”But that’s what they want you to think,” you say? Yeah, yeah …)

But the third, and best, piece of evidence for marvel b0y being real is the cease-and-desist letter, which bears the signature and letterhead of Eli Bard, the publisher’s deputy general counsel. Marvel might convince its writers to play along, but I simply can’t believe its senior litigator would manufacture, or lend his name to, a fake legal document designed to prop up a marketing hoax.

Of course, I could be wrong on all counts (but I don’t think so). If I am, the line for pointing and laughing begins forming at 417 Fifth Ave.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under Comic Books, Creators, Fandom, Internet, Legal, Marvel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.