please stop

now there’s pop-up ads on the videos on youtube. well that’s just tremendous.

while i’m on the subject, dear marvel. i stopped caring about secret invasion this week.

first, as has been said elsewhere, this should really have been a weekly. eight issues over seven months, with only 22 pages a month? you’re pushing it for an Event. may to christmas? what the hell. if this had been a weekly it’d be done already, with another six months of ‘tie in’ issues simply being the aftermath in all the core books affected by the story.

second, as has been stated elsewhere, the first issue was $3.99 for cardstock cover and forty pages of story. the second issue was $3.99 for cardstock cover and standard 22 pages of story. kind of instantly hammering home how little value single comics have anymore. the old ‘i could be getting a volume of manga for two or three issues of comics, and manga has a consistent creative team for the entire run, and an ending so that the story actually matters’ thing, or maybe the ‘put this out as a webcomic five days a week, put out monthy issues of the previous months web-strips, put out tpbs every four-six months, etc.’ trick.

third, the last page of secret invasion 2 should have been the first page of secret invasion 1. i mean, the end of issue one was pretty great, the 2008 heroes face to face with a shipload of marvel heroes in their 70s costumes, and set up tons of story potential tied into the ‘anyone could be a skrull and maybe not even know’ angle you’ve been pushing in every other book for months now.

then issue 2 dropped and, nope, the 70s heroes are skrulls, except maybe hawkeye’s old girlfriend, and captain america, which is kind of a stupid way to have him come back. now was it a skrull, pretending to be captain america, fighting for the anti-registration side? was it a skrull who’d never heard of myspace?

so that’s disappointing on a matrix revolutions level, but then two dozen superskrulls, wearing skrull-ified costumes of the heroes they’ve stolen their powers from, descend from a spaceship over new york city. now THAT is something i want to read eight issues of.

but that was two weeks ago. and now that moment is gone, and suddenly the whole thing is starting to look kind of crap, and we’re waiting for bendis to post a condescending response that all the fans who read his ’skrull invasion powered by religious zealotry’ as an islamic jihadist parallel were just reading it wrong.

if this isn’t all a giant secret wars sequel, if we don’t find out that like wolverine has been a skrull since 1983 and now skrullverine has to fight his own programming and either die at the hands of the real wolvie who’s back from twenty years in a skrull prison, or defeat his programming and get his own book or something…

i just want it to be over, because i no longer trust that it’s going to have been worth the trouble.