Thursday, April 16, 2009

And Now a Message From the Sponsors...

When I signed up on 1up.com as an avid listener of the podcasts, I'm sure I had some ill conceived notion that I would spontaneously spark an interest in modern games, and start blogging profusely. Alas, with perhaps the rare exception of the odd elaborate insult to the current industry and fanbase, I've done little of that. Instead, most of my posts redirect you toward other venues, where I can be found taking superheroes seriously and generally phoning it in.

I recently noticed that, despite my inactivity, a modest flow of folk were hitting this here blog.
I don't know how, or why, you found your way here, but I have an overwhelming urge to try to make it worth your while, despite my being a total slack and uninspired bastard.

If you've been here before, you probably know me as a comic guy. Fair enough.
You can, after all, find my pseudo-superheros-sports blog at http://secretearths.blogspot.com, and buy my modest writing at http://www.nitelitetheatre.com. The question is, why should any of that even matter to you, the 1up.com reader?

The obvious pop culture significance of superheroes aside, there has to be more. More. More!

Unfortunately, there isn't, so instead of coming up with something really interesting, I thought I'd at least fill the void with some overlapping. Comics and video games do occupy a similar space. The same kinds of people find the same kinds of interests, and so, there's a happy tradition of cross pollonation between the seasoned statesman of the comics industry, and active power fantasy of the video gaming experience, which becomes a sequential format the more it ages.

If I was going to use up UGO's newly acquired webspace with the picture feature, I wanted to have a motivated reason. Thus, in merging my interests, I thought I might share with you some of the adverts that have come to populate the landscape of comic books.

With the death of iconic print rags like EGM, it strikes me that many interested readers might never get to see this facet of the advertising strategum. Honestly, before I considered doing this, I hadn't really noticed just how many gaming adverts there still are! I've already got a nice stack of 2008 and 2009 commercials to share with you, albeit, mostly revolving around bland shooting games I personally couldn't give a rats arse about.

The scanning process has already thrown up it's first intriguing tidbit.
Whilst surveying issues from the past few months, I was surprised to find that it was DC comics who had a far greater share of gaming adverts, dominating the barren House of Ideas. One can note theories of vocational relevance that would explain the loyalties of one related brand, to another, but that might be reading in to it a little bit much.

Never the less, I hope you, the reader, will come to enjoy subsequent features of adverts, and enter a suggestable mindset that will allow me to milk you for sales of my comic(s).

Stay tuned!
Cheers!

Original Post: http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8986134

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