ART AND WORDS:
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE CONTENT IN SECRET INVASION #3

by Michael B. McDaniel and his many, many words

    This might the strangest subject for any article that I’ve written so far on my little store’s website but it was inspired by one of the books that I read this week. Secret invasion #2 arrived in stores and it was one of the first books that I perused through in the shipment. From time to time, I’ll skim through a book when it arrives in order to see get a feel for what happens in it with the intention of reading it later.
     As I leafed through the pages, I got the feeling that it might be a little light on content. I mean, in an age of almost $4.00 per gallon gasoline, a comic with a four dollar price tag should be worth the four dollars that you shell out, right? Maybe there was something that I was missing I told myself as I put it down to start pulling the comics for all the loyal subscribers we have. I vowed to read it in ernest later knowing that Marvel Comics <sarcasm alert> the great comic publisher that it is wouldn’t try to gouge us!

Hours later after reading the comic…

     To my shock, my first impression was indeed correct. Light was a fair description of the comic. What do I mean by light you might ask? Well for starters, the comic had 23 pages of total ‘Secret Invasion’ content which includes one catch-up page at the beginning of the issue. In the twenty-three pages, Leinil Yu (the artist of the book) rendered 93 panels of art. Of these pages, three were splash pages of only one total panel and four more pages had 3 or fewer panels. To understand what this means, I took a few books off the shelf- one from each company that we got in this week’s shipment. Take a look at my handy-dandy comparison breakdown below:

Secret Invasion #3 (of 7) $3.99 MARVEL COMICS
Total Pages         23
Panels                   93
Splash Pages      3              (with additional 4 pages with 3 or fewer panels)

Avengers/Invaders #2 (of 12) $2.99 MARVEL COMICS
Total Pages         23
Total Panels        101
Splash Pages      2              (with additional 4 pages with 3 or fewer panels)

 Nightwing #145 $2.99 DC COMICS
Total Pages         22
Total Panels        102        
Splash Pages      1              (with additional 0 pages with 3 or fewer panels)

Red Sonja #34 $2.99 DYNAMITE COMICS
Total Pages         22          
Panels                   85
Splash Pages      3              (with additional 1 pages with 3 or fewer panels)

Amory Wars 2 #1 (of 5) $2.99 DARK HORSE COMICS
Total Pages         22          
Panels                   90
Splash Pages      2              (with additional 2 pages with 3 or fewer panels)

     Now, of the four other comics that I looked at in addition to ‘Secret Invasion’, only two had fewer panels of art and both of those being from smaller or independent publishers. So the other two comics from major publishers (DC and Marvel) had more panels of art- which is more artwork- for a whole buck less! In my mind, less art means less comic. Factor in that only one of the other comics had the same number of splash pages. Also, only one other comics had the same number of pages with three of fewer panels.
Obvious Conclusion: Secret Invasion charges us more money for less art!
      Well what about the other side of the creative process of this most visual of mediums, you ask? Surely, with a scribe like Brian Michael Bendis we wouldn’t be short on words, right? I mean, I can’t tell you how many fans of Bendis have been in the store bragging about how great his stories are and how good he is with dialogue.  <Sarcasm Alert> He is Marvel’s hottest writer in the Wizard’s Hot Writer poll and the Wizard never lies! That alone should equal more words, right?
     Wrong! The third installment of Secret Invasion, which is Marvel’s big Summer Event and is a spiraling cross-over of epic proportions poised to consume all of our spare comic-buying dough has a total of about 744 words. This does not count the catch up page at the front of the book. For a comparison of like-minded summer crossovers, DCs ‘Final Crisis’ #1 had over 2000+ words in its 32 pages. The first issue of ‘Secret Invasion’ suffers the same verbiage drought as the third issue (albeit not in the same ballpark) coming in at 1836 words in just 40 pages.
     To gain an either further point of reference which will undoubtedly drive my tiresome point home to savory meat, I direct you to consider Marvel Adventures Spiderman #40.  In this issue of a comic aimed primarily at a much younger audience, there are 1133 words…on the first 12 pages of the twenty-two page book. I would have counted the whole book but counting words in comics was getting really tiresome! Come on, Bendis! You let a writer in a book for 12 year olds out do you in a third of the pages of your total book!     
     With a paucity of both art and words and the fact that this very article that you have read has over eight-hundred and sixty words in its composition, a particular phrase comes to mind: Dude, where’s my comic?