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MOVIE THEATRE showing the film. To the kids and their parents. As. They. Go. In. If I were Marvel, I'd have half a story inside, the last page of which says, "Want to find out what happens to Spidey? Call 1-888-266-4226 or point your web-browser to www.the-master-list.com to find a comic shop nearest you." AND THEN have the sixteen-page end of the story waiting there at the shops FOR FREE." So, with the success of super-retailer Joe Field’s Free Comics Day, which, as you’ll recall, was piggy-backed on the release of Spider-Man , we in comics now see a resurgence of interest in our art form by those regular folks who, if they thought of comics at all in the last ten years, probably wondered, "Comics? They still make those?"

So that’s good.

But you still can’t get Spider-Man comics, and we don’t have anyone to complain to, and that’s bad.

Parenthetically, I want to make it clear here that I’m definitely not Marvel bashing with this column. Far from it; in fact, I’ve been very much enjoy ing the sea-change that Jemas and Quesada have caused the past year or so. Marvel’s had a major shift in their business strategy, and that sort of thing is always going to lead to growing pains. Exactly because their plan is so different from what has come before, though, it’s hard for the hoi and the polloi to understand. I mean, imagine you’re running Marvel, and you have to explain to an angry mob of pitchfork-and-torch-wielding retailers again why you’re not going back to press on anything when you’ve got the NUMBER ONE MOVIE IN AMERICA to get the regular Joes interested in your comics, and Entertainment Weekly and others reviewing Peter Bagge’s Megalomaniacal Spider-man to interest the hipster with your indy street-cred… And forget explaining that to people who just want to buy the comics. They don’t care that Marvel’s trying to get retailers to increase their initial orders. They don’t care that the orders for these books were placed three months ago. They just want their comics, and if they can’t get them, well… you know as well as I do they’re going to go spend their money on some thing else. Because a pop culture-consuming audience is nothing if not fickle. But there are a few things they could do to alleviate the damage, and this one goes for any publisher of comic books, too: they could have a team of community managers.

You know what the theory is here, right? That a set of folks who have access

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