Curses, foiled again: Steven Grant examines the '90s-era tactics Marvel is using to market Secret War, complete with commemorative editions and special ordering incentives:

"What I don't get is why they just had to muck it up with the special edition nonsense. That's like trying to create an instant collectible under the guise of helping out retailers and promoting a book. All they had to do was go back to press with it. Just do another run of the thing to order. No visible differences. The people who didn't get copies before and wanted it, it wouldn't have made any difference to them. What, they're going to say, 'Gee, this is a rip, we only got the comic we asked for!'?"

And while he's on the subject of the 1990s, Grant also looks at the decade as the Golden Age of "anti-character":

"Seriously, I've been writing little reports on character after character, and it's like someone flipped a switch and the business decided the essence of character was a superpower or eight, a costume and a fighting name. Character after character introduced without motive, history or explanation, as if superpowers (or, often as not, some sort of expensive, heavily armed armor) were the most natural thing in the world. Which, I guess, in a world where half the population are super-powered mutants and the others are gods in drag, they are, and that's also part of the problem."