Thanks in part to an unprecedented marketing campaign that generated big buzz on the internet, Secret Invasion, the latest Marvel Comics crossover event, launched last Wednesday to strong initial sales. By learning from previous successes, encouraging brainstorming across departmental lines and adopting internet marketing methods, Marvel is thinking outside the box to find new ways to sell comics—and according to retailers, the comics are selling.
The series, which launched April 2nd, revolves around a race of classic Marvel characters originally created by legendary creators Stan Lee and the late Jack Kirby: Skrulls, alien shapeshifters who have infiltrated the ranks of the Marvel superheroes and paved the way for an invasion of Earth. The first issue was released simultaneously with a trade paperback called Secret Invasion: The Infiltration, which reprinted the various stories leading up to the event.
Crossover events—epic storylines that involve virtually every series across a comics publisher’s universe of characters and titles—have become tremendously important in generating both media interest and sales for both Marvel and DC Comics, the Big Two of American comics publishing. Like its previous crossover event, Civil War, which earned considerable mainstream press in 2006, Marvel hopes that pitching the niche to media outlets like Entertainment Weekly, which previewed the first ten pages of the series online, will catch the attention of consumers outside mainstream superhero comics circles.
“We've done a lot of mainstream pushes, not just to the industry itself, but to a larger audience,” said Marvel v-p of merchandising and communication Mike Pasciullo. “The characters are icons that people are aware of even if they're not buying comics regularly,” Pasciullo said, “but if you tell interesting stories, they will seek them out.”
Acclaimed Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis, the writer of Secret Invasion, agreed. “We’re trying to reach out to the millions of people that might never read a comic.” He describes the marketing shift as part of an effort to stop undervaluing the medium. “The comics [industry] in general tends to treat itself like an ugly stepsister of film or TV,” said Bendis. “But it’s not, so let's not treat it that way. Let’s sell it like they sell a movie.”
And if popular movies like Cloverfield or the forthcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, are any indication, viral marketing is a big part of doing just that. The approach uses consumers themselves to pass along marketing messages through the internet, capitalizing on the net’s ability to replicate and pass along information quickly and often exponentially.
Marvel’s most successful viral marketing effort used the online social network Myspace, where a seemingly normal girl named Kinsey began posting video blogs to her profile. Although they often revolved around the mundane details of teenage life, like not getting asked to the prom, they soon focused on the increasingly odd behavior of her brother—who was ultimately revealed to be a Skrull.
Of course, there was no Kinsey; the idea was the brainchild of Marvel.com’s assistant editor Ben Morse, and Kinsey was played by his girlfriend, Meg Sherlock. According to Sam Walker, who directed and filmed the videos, they prepared for the viral marketing by building a Myspace friend base of 18-22 year-olds in the tri-state area for Kinsey—including a significant number of women, a segment of the population largely missing from the superhero market.
Although the majority of the responses to Kinsey were still from men, “a large number of girls around that age really related to her and her problems,” said Walker. “We’ve had a fairly strong female response,” Pascuillo agreed, a phrase rarely heard in superhero comics, where the typical readership is overwhelmingly male. Much like the mainstream media efforts to reach a broader readership, the Kinsey videos reached out to a demographic that typical comics marketing campaigns rarely address.
“We weren’t sure if it was going to be hit or miss, because it's something we’ve never done in the comic industry,” said Pascuillo. But with over a quarter of a million views on the videos, they’ve been such a hit that Marvel now plans to make a webcomic about the continuing adventures of Kinsey.
Marvel will also be reaching out to fans in more physical ways at the upcoming New York Comic Con. The company will distribute Skrull masks at the show and encourage fans to take pictures of themselves and upload them to Marvel.com as “evidence” of the Skrull infiltration. This is intended not only to create user-generated content in support of the series, but also to draw readers into the storyline.
“I think it all goes back to [Marvel editor-in-chief] Joe Quesada's overall view, that Marvel is supposed to be this community that's not just the people in the [Marvel] building, it's everyone who reads the comics and loves the characters,” said Pascuillo.
“We’re trying to recreate the feeling people used to have that they were part of the Marvel bullpen,” Bendis explained. He credits the internet with expanding the possibilities for community among fans, allowing them to connect not just locally, but worldwide. “This is still the first generation that’s had that, and what you’re seeing in the marketing reflects that,” Bendis said.
“It’s been selling extremely well,” Jud Meyers, co-owner of the Earth 2 comics store in Sherman Oaks, California, told PWCW in a telephone interview. While Meyers thinks the series is “geared more towards the average comic book reader than someone walking in off the street,” he said that it is pulling in people who already have a latent interest in comics. “A lot of comic readers that haven’t been reading comics in a while are coming back to it because it’s tied into the Marvel heroes and of the 60s and 70s,” said Meyers.
Joe Field, who runs Flying Colors Comics in Concord, California, said that although he hasn’t noticed an influx of new faces, his regular buyers have been snapping up the series at rates comparable to Civil War. After ordering the initial serial issue, Secret Invasion #1, at similar numbers to Civil War #1, Flying Colors sold about two-thirds of that stock in five days. “That’s very strong for us,” said Field.
“It’s selling like hotcakes,” agreed Gerry Gladstone, co-owner of Midtown Comics in New York. “It’s definitely up there with Civil War.”
Pascuillo attributes the success of the launch and the marketing campaign behind it to Marvel’s collaborative approach, which on a corporate level has brought together the ideas of not just the marketing department, but the editors, the creative talent, and the online division of Marvel.
“It’s a very collaborative effort… You have a great idea, and then you add more people to it and they put in their two cents,” said Pascuillo. “When you pull in all these different departments, it really becomes something amazing.”
