[...] worth it.” I know that the writer is attempting to bring some emotional weight to the much-promoted death of a major character, and I feel sort of scuzzy repurposing his work, because inside the fictional [...]

I’m sure the Digital Comics Preservation team at ‘trackerb’ will have it in their weekend distribution. Alas, only the cover made it in yesterday’s.

I was only reading X-men for three or four years.

…Why the hell is this news? Why is anyone paying any attention to this? At all?

Right you are. The Initiative has one superhero telling another that he’s alive. Was there originally supposed to be a delay between the two issues? The release date for both on Marvel.com do have this week’s date.

And it is interesting that we aren’t being greeted with a second printing announcement… surely Marvel isn’t making money in the secondary market…

I hope that for future generations, Marvel either brings back the ‘classic’ Cap, or keeps the Ultimate Cap around, but with a better writer than he’s had in recent years.

Hm, I just realized the Civil War plot point would have been pretty interesting if Marvel were still pushing the idea that the Ultimate titles would eventually become the primary Marvel Universe since, in that case, this death could be permanent while the character continues to be published.

I’ve been keeping my mouth shut so far, because Marvel did say pretty clearly that comic shops should order more, but, as far as I saw, there wasn’t much indication what level of order more they were talking about — we quadrupled our usual Captain America numbers and we’re just about out.

That said, none of the new faces we’ve seen today are new to comics, just checking if we have any more because their normal shop is out.

Sure. But how many went out to buy an issue? I had a friend come up to me and ask if I’d heard about it, but she has no intention of going any further with it than that. She just thought it was odd that the newswires were talking about a fictional character dying. (I think the exact quote was something like “what – Paris Hilton has a day off or something?”)

That’s what I mean by “what’s the point?” – Marvel has been doing a GREAT job lately of stoking up the hype machine around their stuff, but there’s no follow-through. Now, if there was a Captain America movie getting released this month, or some similar tie-in where non-comics folks could see it and associate it with the news story then I’d see the point. But as it is the only real result is going to see is whether current comics readers bite and pick up the issue or not — the play in the rest of the wider world is mostly meaningless to Marvel’s ultimate bottom line.

(Now, as a gimmick to get folks to pick up Brubaker’s Captain America it might be worthwhile in the end – its a well written book. But its still a gimmick – nothing more, nothing less.)

It’s purpose is not “to stick”. It’s to make people talk about it. It doesn’t matter what Cap’s status is in five years. Marvel got what they wanted out of the story today. When I get this story e-mailed to me by three separate non-comics reading friends, I know a ton of eyeballs are taking in this information. Objective met.