So I returned it.

although i’d posit that if they didn’t show the girls in the first trailer that’s not promising for their importance to the plot. then again, they didn’t show ron perlman, and i’d have expected that, since he’s kind of in a big movie right now.

yeah. if we accept that the alien is a humanoid, there’s no inherent reason for him to be anglosaxon unless he’s a shapeshifter and he’s adapted to his environs. not that he needs to be green or blue, although a very deep olive-green or reddish-brown would be interesting to see. just off enough to look distinct without being overtly martian.

still, having read a bit more, i like cavezial now, so bring it on.

They were not in continuity; “Dr. Who” was a human scientist — not addressed as “The Doctor,” like on TV, but actually “Dr. Who” — who just happened to have invented a time machine.

Apply this to Marvel, and they could charge quite a bit for print ads. Instead of saying “your ad will appear in this issue of Spider-Man, which this many thousand people should read”, they can promise that the ad will appear in every single comic they print for any given time period.

There’s no average circulation rate now … but after one month Marvel would have a number to compare to pre-POD print sales (which they are no doubt currently tracking). After a year, if it all doesn’t fail horribly, they’d have enough data to show advertisers the difference in market reach from the old system vs. the new system, and thereby justify whatever pricing they wanted. Ad sales for Marvel would become the equivalent of click-throughs. Client X buys a full-page ad in every book printed for March 2008–the more Marvel sells that month, the more they’ve just made off Client X.

Obviously there’s a host of logistical issues to account for here (Marvel would have to spend quite a bit on the server space just to host the proposed website, and Amazon (the oft-mentioned elephant in the room) took seven years to turn a real profit. But the facts are as Sean has stated them; comic sales are down, nobody’s got a good idea to improve them, and the existing structure of the market actively discourages new customers with enormous barriers to entry. Marvel’s got a back catalog of nearly forty years’ worth of content that could be making them money. There are plenty of people who would pay for it, but Marvel doesn’t really know who they are, or how they want it served up. The power of this idea is that it allows Marvel to establish a real one-on-one relationship with their customers, which will easily increase sales. The brilliance of the idea is that it also makes it enormously easy to generate new customers, and to reach folks who don’t currently read comics.

although you’re reminding me, ryan caught a trek fan-show once where two trekkies were debating the idea that everything after picard entered the nexus in generations was a dream.