To Spoil or Not to Spoil
Mar. 9th, 2007 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ingvildThis post contains spoilers for the end of Marvel's Civil War and Captain America #25. But I'm not actually going to talk about what happened, or the readership's reaction to it. I'm going to talk about spoilers.
Recap: Civil War is about the Superhuman Registration Act. Iron Man is for registration, Captain America is against. A lot of crap happens, including hunting underage superheroes with big guns, building superhuman prisons in the Negative Zone and cloning Thor. (This leads to Susan Storm-Richards leaving her husband. She comes back, but they need therapy.)
Iron Man wins, Captain America is lambasted for not being in touch with modern-day America because he doesn't know what MySpace is, and on the way to trial he's shot and killed.
Captain America dies.
This was apparently important enough that it showed up on *real-life* CNN. Plus a lot of other places, nicely listed here.
Now, imagine that right after Citizen Kane came to the theatres, a newpaper wrote "Rosebud is the sled" all over the front page. Or that after Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, we get "Darth Vader is Luke's father." Or maybe Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: "Snape Kills Dumbledore".
Why is it okay to spoil the ending of a comic book? Is it lack of respect for the comic reading community, or something else? Fine, this can be read as a symbolic thing, but the papers started writing about it the same time the book came out. They did the same thing with Spider-Man's unmasking - hell, I saw that in a Norwegian newspaper.
I think part of it is the format. Twenty-five pages of text and illustration published once a month somehow doesn't seem as important as a four-hundred page novel or a two-hour film. Do they do this to TV series as well? I've heard that the ending for Doctor Who season 2 was spoiled in Britain.
But partly, I think, it's because mainstream media and, indeed, "normal" people, don't have too much respect for comic book fans. And maybe they think about when they were kids, and Captain America was the upholder of the American Way, and Spider-Man wore a mask. "Comics aren't the same, and who cares about those who read them now - I don't."
Recap: Civil War is about the Superhuman Registration Act. Iron Man is for registration, Captain America is against. A lot of crap happens, including hunting underage superheroes with big guns, building superhuman prisons in the Negative Zone and cloning Thor. (This leads to Susan Storm-Richards leaving her husband. She comes back, but they need therapy.)
Iron Man wins, Captain America is lambasted for not being in touch with modern-day America because he doesn't know what MySpace is, and on the way to trial he's shot and killed.
Captain America dies.
This was apparently important enough that it showed up on *real-life* CNN. Plus a lot of other places, nicely listed here.
Now, imagine that right after Citizen Kane came to the theatres, a newpaper wrote "Rosebud is the sled" all over the front page. Or that after Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, we get "Darth Vader is Luke's father." Or maybe Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: "Snape Kills Dumbledore".
Why is it okay to spoil the ending of a comic book? Is it lack of respect for the comic reading community, or something else? Fine, this can be read as a symbolic thing, but the papers started writing about it the same time the book came out. They did the same thing with Spider-Man's unmasking - hell, I saw that in a Norwegian newspaper.
I think part of it is the format. Twenty-five pages of text and illustration published once a month somehow doesn't seem as important as a four-hundred page novel or a two-hour film. Do they do this to TV series as well? I've heard that the ending for Doctor Who season 2 was spoiled in Britain.
But partly, I think, it's because mainstream media and, indeed, "normal" people, don't have too much respect for comic book fans. And maybe they think about when they were kids, and Captain America was the upholder of the American Way, and Spider-Man wore a mask. "Comics aren't the same, and who cares about those who read them now - I don't."
