DC Comics' Countdown: Arena - trade paperback marketing ploy?
DC's recently opened their official Countdown: Arena website, where you (yes, you!) can vote which Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern from the Multiverse (well, three different Earths, at least), becomes the ultimate fighting champion part of Monarch's Countdown army (or so they tell me. Waiting for the trade and all that).
Cynical minds can't help but notice that if you click the Superman and Batman links, however, the DC website oh-so-helpfully offers you links to the relevant trade paperbacks where these characters appear. Not that there's anything wrong with that — more trade paperback sales are good for all of us — but I'm starting to wonder if this whole return-of-the-Multiverse thing isn't, in the end, a really good sales strategy.
Because now, all the characters that appeared in all those Elseworld stories hanging around the disperate DC collections now become NEW and RELEVANT (take Batman: Red Rain and the Tangent Universe, for instance), and that means the collectors have to have them. Sheer brilliance!
Yeah, I'm being a little facetious. But let's just see what other so-called "Tales of the Multiverse" reissues are coming around the corner ...
(Speaking of fighting, being Friday night and all, check out the super Tale of the Tape video rocking the casbah at Bahlactus right now!)
I also was excited when I was told on Newsarama that I could vote only to visit the site, cast my vote, and notice that they were not recorded in any way.
ReplyDeleteOnce voting and moving onto another character my vote was not remembered made me think twice. So I voted again and noticed that no data seemed to be sent anywhere when navigating through the site. So, I do agree that this may just be a sly marketing ploy... good think I have many of these trades already.
Yeah ... let's watch when the issues come out and see if that voting actually seems to count. I'm highly suspicious ...
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