Howling Hell

Next week, the second issue of Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos hits shelves. I won’t buy it. Chances are, you won’t either.

Best as I can tell, it’s a pile of junk. Normally, a book this silly looking – it seems to feature a team of monsters Nick Fury sends out to fight something, for some reason – wouldn’t be enough to grab my attention beyond a glance at the cover.

Luckily, NF’sHC was the beneficiary of an almost unbelievable stroke of advertising. Not only did it receive advertising, which is much more than most books get, but it earned mention in pretty much every Marvel book in the months leading up to the first issue. And not only was it in every issue, but it took up numerous preview pages in the back of each title. I can’t recall any previous advertising onslaught to match it, at least for something so clearly undeserving.

The preview pages weren’t too annoying themselves. I could easily just not read them, after all. But what really raised my ire is the waste of it. Just how much money did Marvel spend in extra printing for those pages?

Just recently, a lack of attention killed one of my favorite Marvel series, the New Invaders. Granted, it was never destined to be a top seller. But I can’t help but wonder if I’d still be enjoying the humor of Allan Jacobsen and the great art of C.P. Smith if the company had put just a hundredth of the marketing behind it that they did the Howling stinkbomb.