Yesterday, I posted that Marvel had announced that Kitty Pride would be returning in March in the pages of Uncanny X-Men (by Matt Fraction). The day before that, David and I double teamed a post in which we kept all the news for DC’s sequel to the Blackest Night, Brightest Day, up to date and relevant. All things are considered, these are pretty big bits of news. While we still don’t know how either are ‘going down’, we know that they are coming.
And that got me thinking.
Warning: This article discusses spoilers on several levels. Every comic discussed in this article has been around for at leasta year, but read at your own risk regardless.
Remember when New X-Men was coming out under the pen of Grant Morrison? Near the end of it, we saw one of the biggest assaults on our brains since the story first began and Cassandra Nova wiped out Genosha: Magneto was alive all this time. As Xorn took of his helmet, a character we had grown to love and respect as a brand new and awesome character (in a slew of awesome new characters) was really one of the most deranged and supreme X-villains of all time, and he was angry. If you had known that the entire time you’re reading, wouldn’t that take away from the surprise of the story? The mystery of the grandiose ending in which Magneto topples New York and brings a large amount of the human population to it’s knees?
This is what I’m thinking about here. With Blackest Night and Uncanny X-Men, we know two major things that are going to come in the future. Of course we know that at the end of Blackest Night, the heroes will win to some capacity and “all will be well” (as everyone keeps saying in the pages of the book). What we don’t know is that it’ll be so well that it will equal something akin to the Brightest Day, which runs through several books in the future. Did we need to know this now? Yes, it’s exciting, but even so. DC is very guilty of this, and quite often. How about when IGN revealed that the Blackest Night villain was Nekron? 
That was the BIGGEST reveal of the entire story, and they chose to reveal this before the halfway mark. Even more so, last year in prepping us for what was to come, they announced several coming events in the DCU, including the Return of Bruce Wayne. Granted, we had all assumed this would happen, but did we need to know it now? Wouldn’t it have been more satisfying to have some it revealed in the contents of the book?
Now granted, with things like Nekron, I guess it’s “ok”, in a manner of speaking. Most people have no idea who Nekron is, and we’ve had him as a character for 3 issues now (including his little appearance at the end of 4). Revealing who Nekron was allowed fans to go back, find his earlier appearances, and get a grip of who he was and why he was the villain. But can you imagine how much more powerful the entire sequence of events would have been if we didn’t know who was coming out of the depths of darkness to torment our heroes? The “WHAT IS NEKRON?!” line would have been a great moment for fans to start hunting down Green Lantern Annual #11 and Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #1-3 to read more about this villain, and what’s worse is that most websites who were providing information on the villain reported the wrong information, MULTIVERSITY COMICS INCLUDED! When Gil wrote up a character spotlight on Nekron, not only did I have him edit the title for the sake of those who didn’t want to know, but I edited the article, adding a paragraph clarifying a commonly mistaken character plot point (see the article for those details).
Marvel is guilty too, of course. I’ve often had storylines ruined for me due to solicits and my being curious for what’s coming out. The ending of Ultimatum was spoiled due to the solicits for every Requiem title, and sure Ultimatum wasn’t that great and ruining it didn’t matter, but for those of us who actually sat through and read it, most of us wanted to just go along with the story. And one TERRIBLE spoiler was with the end of Messiah War and the upcoming Cable solicits saying exactly what happened to Cable and Hope at the end. Same with X-Force. I did not appreciate that. In fact, if anything it’s taught me to stay away from solicits other than to know a) what I’m going to want to read and b) what covers look cool.
Continued belowOf course, one thing I could say partly in their defense is the handling of Dark Reign. 
While not perfect. it was a little better. Before Secret Invasion ended, they announced that the upcoming storyline following it was “Dark Reign,” in a similar manner that DC just announced Brightest Day. Unlike Blackest Night, we weren’t really able to guess what this all meant, and that was that Norman Osborn was the savior of all humanity, which has led us to the current evils that plague our Marvel Universe. Of course, what we did know is the cover of Secret Invasion: Dark Reign, a book coming out right after Secret Invasion, which showed the Cabal. We couldn’t tell who everyone was, but we saw who was there, and we began to put pieces together. Now, when we actually saw that Osborn fired the bullet that took down the Skrull Queen, we were all shocked and surprised. But all the chances for the story to be ruined were there, and we were dangerously close to knowing.
Marvel continues to tease us with the post Siege stuff, citing “the Heroic Age” as the future of Marvel. Bendis repeatedly claims that NO ONE will guess the end of Siege, and I’m apt to believe the man, but even so. We’re getting into this dangerous territory again, and that’s what I want to talk about.
The internet is here. The digital revolution happened. We all know it and we’ve come to grips with it. However, despite the fact that I continuously come across these spoilers and I know what’s going to happen before it does does not necessarily mean I want to. I feel somewhat hypocritical in writing this article, but let’s face it: as much as I was excited about Magneto coming back during the Nation X arc, I would have been even more excited if I hit the last page of Uncanny X-Men #515 and saw Big Red there out of the blue, in a similar way that we saw him get his powers back a few arcs earlier. The big two are doing a poor job of walking the line of teasing and telling, and while I’m all for teases, the telling is what gets me.
Of course, there are spoilers in the way books are released not in time. Blackest Night: Flash spoiled the end of Flash: Rebirth, and the New Avengers Annual (as well as others) spoiled the end of Captain America: Reborn. I have made the argument that, with stories like Cap: Reborn, you pretty much know how it is going to end, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of mystery to pursue. As we saw in the Who Will Wield The Shield one-shot, Steve doesn’t even want to be Captain America right now, which is something most of us probably wouldn’t have seen coming. Of course, that was released BEFORE the last issue, which is still yet to come out. Cap: Reborn is an odd book to take shots at because it was supposed to be 5 issues and then Brubaker and Hitch decided to add another book worth of material to it, but even so. It doesn’t match up with the Marvel Timeline anymore, and now the rest of the universe has moved on without it, thus spoiling how it would have inevitably ended.
And if it’s not the publisher releasing a solicit, or a book not being released on time, it’s us as fans. Blackest Night #6 “leaked” a week before it was due to be released, and there were pictures of the latest Lantern corps members everywhere. Heck, with comics being scanned online and being released digitally throughout the internet, it’s getting as bad as it was when the RIAA was dealing with music piracy. Now, if you don’t want to buy a book, you can still read it anyway, which often takes away from the publishers, and Marvel has already had it’s bankruptcy scare once. All the comic book publishers are trying to think of new ways to keep fans buying books, or at least supporting the stories that they love, but never the less. When a book is out, it’s now game for the internet. And with all images being available online, we can see how a book ends even before we read it. Peter David used to REGULARLY begin each issue of X-Factor politely asking fans NOT to discuss the events held in the book on message boards in order to keep the secrets of the book kept up tight, and it has worked in great favor for the stories. Despite knowing the covers of future issues, each ending knocks us out the park regardless, and X-Factor continues to be one of the top books on the market.
Continued belowLook at it this way: in the past couple weeks, we’ve had three teasers from Marvel: a Spider-Man teaser, a Fantastic Four teaser, and a SHIELD teaser. All three of these are great because they show images that are related in some way that we can’t begin to know yet. It gets us talking. DC used to do this all the time, with the I AM BATMAN images, and the big posters before Countdown and Final Crisis showing a lot of heroes’ weapons strewn on the ground and villains running wild. Those were cool. As we look back on these now, we can see what all these images mean and the knowledge is pleasing. This is what I prefer. Being flat out told something is just not as fun.
Of course, one could say “Why not just avoid them?” Well, for a lot of us, it can be hard. For one, we have a widget on our website that feeds all the latest news from all of our favorite publishers, so if a spoiler pops on that and I’m just reading the news of the day, that’s over for me. I also have a lot of comic nerd friends who text me about comic goings-on. That’s how I heard about Kitty coming back, because someone texted me and said, “Man, I can’t believe Marvel ruined their own surprise” (to which I responded, “What, Stan Lee at ECCC?” and they replied, “No, Kitty is coming back.”) Things like this happen, and when the information is out there, it’s hard to avoid. There was a time when I had no interest in knowing who was in the Green Lantern film because I just wanted to see a trailer/see the film, but it’s a bit too late for that now, isn’t it?
My point is this – we all love comics, and we all love buying comics. Most of us buy comics in single issue form not just to support our favorite characters, authors, and artists, but because we love the mystery of the way stories are pulled along. Most comics end with a cliff hanger that is supposed to pull you in after the first issue. Did anyone read JSA All-Stars? The end of that issue and the reveal that Johnny Sorrow has returned is a) something that was not announced at any time and b) the reason I decided to add the book to my pull despite my initial trepidation. 
This is the sort of story telling that makes buying single issues great. Buying a trade is great and all, and you get the whole story right there (which, supposedly, can sometimes make things better), but I love cliff hangers. I love not knowing. I hate knowing.
So while I will continue to get caught up in spoilers and I will continue to report the ones that are big on this website, I can’t help but create an informal and open letter to every comic publisher out there: keep things secret. If you want us to know something, tease us more often. Not only do those promote MORE discussion, it often promotes more excitement. If there is someone that just HATES Kitty Pride, they’re definitely going to avoid Uncanny X-Men now. This is just the way of things. It only hurts the story to know how it ends, and trust me: the endings, when everything ties together and makes sense, is usually the best part of any story.
