I was on Marvel.com today and I saw the oddest thing. An ad banner above the home page advertising the DVD release of a Batman: TAS collection.
Funny. All the crosswords. All the rivalry and sometimes HATRED.
But when money is involved, they play nice!
I wonder what such an ad cost TW?
Marvel and DC put ads in each other’s comics all the time. They also occasionally do crossovers where their characters appear together in the same issue. They’re major corporations who realize they have virtually the exact same target audience, not 2nd graders fighting in the sandbox.
I imagine the banner ads are generated completely randomly, as long as they are for “age-appropriate” material. Try going back to Marvel’s site, and you’ll probably see a completely different ad.
I get really tired of the cross-company sniping (especially with the same old rivalries, like Mark Millar’s hatred of Paul Levitz), considering the majority of the creators and staff have worked for both companies at one time or another, and many work for both at the same time. And we’re long past the age of Stan Lee when there was a marked difference in the “feel” of DC and Marvel comics. I know this wasn’t the OP’s intent (he’s as well-versed a comic reader as anyone), but it still astounds me that anyone could love one of the Big Two companies and hate the other, or be blindly loyal to one, or whatever.
No, they really don’t.
Actually, they’re very much like second graders. Most recently, Superman/Batman writer Jeph Loeb made a big stink about how Bendis killed of a Lois Lane analogue in an issue of Avengers (?), so Loeb killed off a bunch of Avengers analogues in S/B. A few months ago, it came out that Paul Levitz (head of DC) was not going to do any more crossovers with Marvel until Marvel E-I-C Joe Quesada was gone because Quesada (and his former boss, Bill Jemas) ran a marketing strategy a few years ago where they were very vocal about how much “AOLComics” sucked. Jemas has since been canned, but DC says it won’t cooperate with Marvel until Quesada is gone too. Hardly a month goes by without someone talking trash about the other company.
–Cliffy
They do for licensed products, at least. I admit that most of my experience is with DC, but their books are chock full of ads for the Elektra movie, Spider-Man games, etc. Heck, even Hellboy showed up on the back of DC comics.
Cliffy, that stuff doesn’t just happen in the comics industry. It happens in nearly every industry. It’s useless to tell a second grader to act like an adult because far too many adults act like second graders. True, you probably won’t see any DC advertisements in a Marvel book (although a comic store ad might feature some DC characters) nor vice versa, but it’s likely the web-site advertising is farmed out. All the time on cable, I see ads on CNN for NBC or CBS and other oddities.
I bet there are Batman Begins in Marvel comics right now.
Flipping through the 5 Marvel comics I picked up today I can tell you there is no ad for the Batman Begins movie in any of them. There is however an ad for the video game.