Wednesday, May 23, 2007

I . . . I think I'm killing comics . . . (not really, of course)

So, I'm reading this interview with Dan Slott about She-Hulk and I noticed a couple of things.

Oh, and please note that I'm not trying to single out Slott. I don't think I've read anything of his and, honestly, have no opinion on him. I'm just mentioning him and this interview as an example because, well, I thought of this stuff while reading it.

1. The interview is all about him leaving She-Hulk for some HUGE, can't-say-no-to project . . . but he can't tell us what it is.

2. Nor are we told who the new creative team will be.

So . . . what was the point of the interview? You could argue it's just a friendly little update, but so what? WHY?

I've noticed a lot of these interviews popping up on Newsarama and every single time they do, I end up screaming "What was the fucking point?"

And I've decided what it is: because people like me will read them.

Newsarama needs content and what creator doesn't love free publicity? And, well, I need something to read between refreshing my inbox and waiting for someone interesting to come on MSN.

I mean, I've never read She-Hulk or anything Dan Slott's written, but I read that fucking interview. AND I read the one from yesterday discussing this week's issue of She-Hulk. What the fuck, man?

Newsarama (and sites like it) suffer from the same problem as cable news channels where they're on 24 hours a day, seven days a week really. Now, Newsarama tends to only update during the usual work hours with minimal updates on weekends (not including convention weekends), but there's still the pressure to constantly give idiots like me new content. They know that and so do the publishers.

Let's be honest, 90% of the content on those sites is bullshit--meaningless, non-information that doesn't really deserve it's own story (hell, in the case I'm talking about, why weren't the two Dan Slott interviews just one longer article?). Most of the time, they're glorified press releases dressed up as interviews meant to give me something to read and feed the hype machine. They're an endless stream of "read the next interview and maybe we'll tell you something . . ."

And if I stopped reading, they'd also stop (and I'm, of course, using "I" to mean all of us), but I most likely won't. That's fucked up.