Spoilsport
It’s getting increasingly hard to avoid spoilers if you’re a comics fan. Just read this article over on Newsarama, which was ostensibly about the above teaser image for DC Comics’ forthcoming stories, but along the way also managed to spoil a comic I bought last week but haven’t had a chance to read yet. Bastards. That’s the second time this week an article about one comic has managed to spoil a surprise in another comic for me.
The internet has pretty much put paid to the days when you could still be surprised by a twist in a comic. These days the only way to guarantee the element of surprise is to not read comics websites at all, and, y’know, that’s not gonna happen. On top of that, both Marvel and – to a much greater extent – DC craft storylines that cross over through so many different comics it becomes next to impossible not to glean information from one title that spoils a storyline in another. And let’s not even get into random ‘act of God’ spoilers, like the time Rachel accidentally showed me the last page of a Grant Morrison New X-Men comic before I’d read it, thus revealing that Xorn had actually been Magneto all along. (And we’ll ignore the later revisionist retcons of this storyline – in which we learn that somehow Xorn was an actual character in his own right all along and not just, as Morrison’s story cleverly and logically dictates, an invention of Magneto, and that on top of that the Magneto from the Morrison run was never really Magneto at all – because, well, they’re just fucking stupid.)
Clearly the answer is to become a hermit, go live in a cave, and have your comics delivered direct to your humble stone dwelling. You could even use them as insulation and kindling once you’ve read them, although that would of course impact their Wizard price guide resale value.
