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The Great "You Call This 'Bonus' Material?" Debate

Don MacPherson has a good piece up at his site here looking at an issue that is certainly irritating to a lot of readers - the "bonus" material in comics that really isn't bonus material because you're paying an extra dollar for it.

  • Posted on November 17, 2008 @ 07:55 PM

7 Comments

I really liked the extras in the Kingdom Come special, so I won't have a negative opinion towards the practice until I feel gipped.

I'm a TPB man myself, but all the same. Charging $18 (IIRC) for reprinting the 3 issue 30 Days of night mini and trying to suggest that sticking a script in the back makes it okay. Or the Punisher War Zone: Civil War tpb which reprints 4 issues followed by a black and white reprint of the first of those four. Or the two recent Superman TPBs which had 3 recent issues and then padded out the rest of the books with silver age reprints...

Disgraceful behaviour all round!

And don't get me started on the Ultimate X-Men/Fantastic Four TPB which managed a whole two issues of story!

A good piece indeed but I think we can all agree that it's just a sneaky plot by the big companies so that they can justify trying to make some extra cash from us. I hate it myself, the worst one I had to come across though was the 'fact files' in the One More Day issues. Like I give a crap what Aunt May's power levels are and how much she can bench-press.

I'm getting sick of this myself. Big Hero 6 #3 at 3.99 had some horrible back material. A ridiculous six-page text story and a two page explanation of american football. WTF? Come ON!

And many times the back material is available for free on the internet.

I don't even consider buying any comic that is trying to sell me something besides pages of comic with maybe some ads in it.

And TPBs are spoiling me when it comes to ads.

The biggest one that caught me was the FCBD X-Men with "bonus material." Who's going to plunk down money for this? Most comic fans already have it for free, and the ones who missed it aren't really going to want to rush to the comic shop just to see the script.

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