So, that Northstar proposal that got Astonishing X-Men so much attention…? Dale Eaglesham, artist on the recent Alpha Flight revival for Marvel has an interesting little tidbit about it:
This drives me absolutely crazy: Greg [Pak], Fred [Van Lente] and I do all the work of bringing the series back and they cancel it on us. Why didn’t they let US do the wedding “event” which is clearly garnering attention, to stimulate readership perhaps keep Alpha Flight going? This pisses me off. Oh no, let the “X” books do it, as if they don’t get enough attention. Sigh……
This wedding was in the works on AF.
This reminds me of the traditional complaint about the books getting marketing attention being the books that don’t need it as much (The explanation, if you’ve never heard it, is that there’s a much more obvious return-on-investment for pushing something that already sells more); of course “Gay X-Man gets married” is going to have a more obvious news hook than “Gay member of Canadian superhero team that has some X-Men connections gets married,” after all. I’m now curious, though, whether Marjorie Liu was given the task of marrying off Northstar when she took on the AXM job, or whether it was her idea that just coincidentally matched the Alpha Flight plans…?
June 7th, 2012 at 7:51 am
Just thought you should know, Eaglesham basically retracted his comment on Wednesday.
“A clarification: the wedding was mentioned in the arc breakdown but apparently was never slated to be in AF, just in the X book. I totally misunderstood that.
D
« Last Edit: June 06, 2012, 02:00 by Dale »”
His point is still valid in that Marvel continues to throw marketing at its better-selling books, stiffing the smaller titles, just not the evidence he used to support it.