Via PR — the new release date is two weeks after the announced date.

Marvel would like to announce that the hotly anticipated, extra-sized Secret Invasion #8 will now arrive in stores on December 3rd, 2008. The top-selling comic book event of 2008, by award winning scribe Brian Michael Bendis and superstar artist Leinil Yu, concludes with this final issue that redefines the Marvel Universe and begins Dark Reign!

“The additional pages in #8 did both Leinil and the schedule in,” explained Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. “Anybody who pored over the artwork from #7 a week ago can easily see how he and Mark Morales have been putting their all (and then some) into every page and every panel, and that effort has finally caught up with us. Hopefully, retailers and fans will forgive us these extra two weeks as we make sure that everything is in the shape it should be in for the extra-sized climax—and from there, it’ll be smooth sailing straight into DARK REIGN.”

David Gabriel, Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Sales, added, “In speaking with retailers, Marvel decided it was more important to preserve the creative integrity of the series, rather than rush out the final issue. This not only creates a stronger product for our loyal readers, but also for our retailer partners, whose support helped make Secret Invasion a huge success.”


Oh, MEOW!

1 COMMENT

  1. Is what it is. I can’t imagine having the solicitations delayed for another couple of weeks helps the retailers much though.

    What IS fairly amusing is Bendis pulling a positively Millar-ian gaffe in a interview on the Wizard site that came up today.(http://www.wizarduniverse.com/102508si7commentary4.html)

    Bendis: “… The day after Secret Invasion issue #8 ships—on time, by the way—Marvel’s releasing a catalogue of the solicitations for Dark Avengers and New Avengers and all the things that will be directly affected by the end of Secret Invasion. And I know for a fact that everyone at Marvel is jones-ing about Dark Reign because it’s really inspired a lot of really cool ideas.”

    I think he just bragged about it on CBR too. Oops.

    In 2008, people should just keep quiet about their books being on time until they’re actually on the stands.

  2. As a retailer… I can say this sucks… for not holding up the story, or the plot, or the line, but the stupid frickin’ solicitations… as Matt D notes. If the currently blacked out Dark Reign solicitations don’t come out until issue 8 of Secret Invasion, than we won’t have the time to learn anything about the books or be able to adjust our orders based on customer opinions… so we’re basically being asked AGAIN to just order huge and hope for the best… (which isn’t what we’ll do, but I assume this is what Marvel thinks will happen, and considering the way most retailers bent over backwards for them at every retailer summit EVER, I’ll bet this is what will happen).

    I don’t want to rant here, but man, MARVEL is really mean to retailers, in a horrid playground type mean that leaves a scar no amounts of beer can solve (for a complete mash of metaphor and all that)

    boo!

  3. Well, considering that a great number of Dark Reign books are delayed too, it shouldn’t be a big issue receiving the whole information a couple weeks later

  4. First — at least Marvel has a legitimate excuse for being two weeks late with Secret Invasion #8: namely, extra pages for the same artist to draw.

    As opposed to DC, where the artist has been flakier with his schedule than Grant Morrison is with the content of his writing (No mean feat, either.)

    Second @ ChaosMcKenzie: this news about SI #8 is new and your point is so logical and obvious that I can’t see Marvel not dealing with this in some way. It’s just too soon for them to have all of the details worked out yet, IMO.

    But I’ll speculate anyway:

    Delaying the follow-up books by two weeks each in order to keep consistent with the FOC date or by simply extending the FOC date by two weeks, depending on how the follow-up books tie-in to each other.

    Delaying at least the initial two weeks of the follow-up books by two weeks seems like it would be the easiest thing to do, but that seems to me like more a fustercluck than the latter option due to storytelling issues.

    OTOH, the latter option would require them to guesstimate and overprint, which they’re clearly loathe to do these days, but given that there are story-based concerns regarding the timing of the follow-ups, it seems to me like the most sensible thing for them to do would be to simply release any books from those delayed two weeks that directly tie-in to SI #8 the same week as SI #8. That seems to me to affect the fewest FOCs and would put Marvel at very low risk by doing the right thing and overprinting by 20%-ish, since retailers seem to underorder too many Marvel books these days.

    Conversely, DC clearly needs to fire some editors and stop using certain artists (and perhaps writers) who seem to not know what a calendar is. I mean, they seem to have learned how to schedule George Perez’s painstakingly detailed books (umm, partly because George Perez, like, commits to a schedule that’s realistic for him) so the inability of DC’s editorial staff to take what some editors have learned from working with Perez and translate that into workable schedules for certain other high-profile artists — there’s just no excuse for DC’s editors to fail at their main function: namely getting the books out at all, with the creators solicited, much less getting the books out on time.

    — Rob

  5. Except as a rule, Marvel does not look out for the retailer. And I’d like to think they are prepared for this, but after talking to Diamond it is becomming apparent that they are not.

    knock on wood and all that…

    The word has come down from on high that we are going to low-ball all of the Dark Reign books and hope Marvel prints up a lot if the demand is going to warrant them in the long run… though the very idea makes me laugh, ’cause I’ve been doing this for a while and know better.

    I love me some superhero comics, and I will never pick between Marvel and DC, but as a retailer… DC are way nicer to me, and I love them for it.

  6. For the record, Secret Invasion 8 was always meant to be 40pgs. Secret Invasion 7 is 32 pages. Nowhere does the PR claim that extra pages are being “added”. They’ve always been there and Yu has just fallen behind.

  7. “In speaking with retailers, Marvel decided it was more important to preserve the creative integrity of the series, rather than rush out the final issue”

    Who you shittin’, boss?

    You realize this whole “epic” could’ve been told over 4-6 regular issue of AVENGERS. But then, we wouldn’t get all those insightful “behind the scenes” stories… like what the Skrulls were doing during House of M (nothing much) or get the surprise factor of Fury’s new Howling Commando’s pretty much yanked away & stomped on.

    I liked this story better the first time I read it: Avengers v1 #92-97. Which, by the way, also had some terrific Neal Adams art.

  8. I wonder if DC had left Final Crisis at 32 pages, that they would have shipped on time. Maybe they should have extended the number of issues.

  9. Camelot 3000 # 12 came out about 11 months after issue 11.

    On the other side, if you want to bring up maxi series from years ago, we could bring up tons of maxi series that did ship on time — Amethyst, Sun Devils, Secret Wars One and Two, Crisis (which had Perez do every single issue, two double sized, he pencilled the entire thing himself and never missed a ship date — I know, I was working at Crown Comics Distributors in Brooklyn at the time) and many, many others.

    But the fact that you bring up Camelot 3000, probably one of the first maxi finite series’ in comics from 1982 — 26 years ago really makes me wonder. Are you trying to compare the quality of Yu’s Secret Invasion to Mike Barr and Brian Bolland’s Camelot 3000?

    Still, back then, late comics were a rare exception, not the rule as opposed to today where everything under the sun ships late.

    Personally, I don’t think a 2 week delay really is much of a delay or much of a big deal when compared to the real problems stemming from the people who, in running things, have created a nasty and hostile, unprofessional environment that is so off putting, its beginning to overshadow the actual stories in the comics themselves.

  10. “For the record, Secret Invasion 8 was always meant to be 40pgs. Secret Invasion 7 is 32 pages. Nowhere does the PR claim that extra pages are being “added”. They’ve always been there and Yu has just fallen behind. ”

    SI7 is only 22 pages of story, though. Count ’em up.

  11. The page count in solicitations include ads. So a 32 page comic is usually a 22 page story. 40 pages for #8 means it’ll be about 30-32 or something around there of story with ads. Maybe people don’t realize that’s how they solicit? Not sure.

  12. “How did Camelot 3000 end?”

    Aliens that looked like sentient pickles found that Excalibur sword on their weird alien pickle planet.

  13. Wait, I missed a Mike Barr sentient pickle comic?! Where the hell was I? Oh, I was 4. Well now I know what to get with my allowance this week.

  14. I went to Newsarama’s post of Marvel’s press release at: http://www.newsarama.com/comics/100828-SI8-Change.html

    I just switched over to mail order (my LCS is actually a one-hour drive away one way and the day-trips were finally getting to me after 4 years since I moved here), and have been putting all of my Previews orders for October-Dec in a spreadsheet in Excel. I get a *lot* of comics (about 120 to 140 in any given month. Yes, I get a lot of superhero comics, but I also get the Comics Journal, Echo (and previously SiP), Groo & Nexus (when they come out), Glamourpuss (and previously Cerebus. I’m bipolar, so it’s fun to watch Dave Sim’s schizophrenia play out in public.), Buffy (of course), Powers, a few manga, and about half of the Vertigo line at any given time. So I’m keeping track.

    Yeah, Marvel has essentially pushed back the first about three weeks of all of its SI/Dark Reign books back by about 2 more weeks across-the-board. I don’t particularly mind as most of those weeks were pretty crammed to begin with.

    Personally, I think that Marvel should get away with this one. Not because I’m a Marvel fan — I’m not; I’m a comics fanboy. It’s because issue #8 has 8 or 10 more story pages than the standard issues of the series. Lenil Yu strikes me as being a fairly fast artist, so maybe they had reason to be optimistic about the book shipping on time. Bendis & Co. have made a lot fewer mistakes in the *scheduling* of Secret Invasion (much less the *storytelling* of the title and the related series) than the gang of Final Crisis has. Secret Invasion’s storyline and those of its spinoffs have been basically linear and mostly self-contained (except for the two Avengers books and the Captain Marvel miniseries, which are only comprehensible as backstory for the main Invasion series).

    It’s not as if the artist has perpetual deadline problems, as with Final Crisis. It’s just that the last issue has more pages.

    Secret Invasion may have hit a speedbump at the end in terms of scheduling, but it’s solid superhero books. Final Crisis, by contast is as disastrous in scheduling as it is in storytelling.

    And pseudo-ironically, it’s somewhat appropriate given the chaotic premise of Final Crisis that the chaos is reflected in both the disastrous storytelling and the Titanic-sinking scheduling. Morrison might just have made a tulpa out of the DC Multiverse after all. But probably not in the way he expected it to be. But I digress . . .

    Anyhow, honestly, I’m FAR more annoyed that the schedule of Powers has been all shot to hell over the past year than that Secret Invasion #8 and a handful of issues spinning out of it have been delayed by 2 weeks. It seems counterproductive to me for comics stores to “lowball” their orders when the FOCs have shifted appropriately and when retailers have been so consistently underordering Marvel books for the past six months or so that they’re going into second and third printings. Seems to me like you’d be underordering ’em whether Marvel was on time with them or not anyway, so I would hazard a guess that your current orders are what the “lowball” orders should look like.

    But hey, go ahead and continue to underorder — Marvel gives you enough lead time with the FOCs anyway. If you can’t take the hint from the massive number of multiple printings lately that you should be upping your orders, then I feel sorry for you for the sales that *you’ve* lost by failing to adjust your orders upwards like you should be doing.

    Yes, nobody likes late books, but they *do* happen and sometimes they even happen for good reasons (more pages) or entirely justifiable reasons (health issues, as with George Perez and JLA/Avengers). At some point, though, the retailers have got to simply order according to what they think they’ll be able to sell rather than “lowball” their orders to spite Marvel, which only spites customers who don’t come in every single week.

  15. Hey Rob, what planet do you live on? Just curious.
    And I love how you criticise DC for being late but then not only ignore all the late marvel titles then tell everyone its ok when marvel does it.
    Is your real name quesada?

    And your most childish comment is about retailers deliberately ordering low to spite marvel. As if any business would damage its INCOME just because they dont like someone.

    What planet were you from again?

  16. The editors will wait, retailers will wait, the fans will wait, so who is having the problem? You can tell that these big comic companies have no real competition.

  17. I wasn’t trying to make a point, it just occurred to me I had no memory of how Camelot 3000 ended.

  18. ShutUpRob said:

    “Personally, I think that Marvel should get away with this one. Not because I’m a Marvel fan — I’m not; I’m a comics fanboy. It’s because issue #8 has 8 or 10 more story pages than the standard issues of the series.”

    Well, that lets Final Crisis off the hook, because every issue of that has been 8 story pages longer than a standard comic book issue.

    And JG Jones was supposed to be responsible for pencilling and inking them…

  19. We’re talking about Camelot 3000? Seriously?

    Yes, DC certainly messed up with the delays on Final Crisis, but does anyone remember Civil War? Issue 1 shipped in May 2006. On the day before issue 4 was supposed to be out (yes, the day before), Marvel announced it would be delayed one month from August to September and that issue 5 would be two months late, releasing in November. Further they said that issue 6 would ship in December and issue 7 would ship in January 2007. Don’t just take my word for it, follow this link:

    http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=80636

    Even after that, Civil War 6 shipped 2 weeks late and Civil War 7 shipped a month late after Marvel rescheduled it in August. So, to recap, CW 4, one month late, CW 5 and 6, two months late, and CW 7, three months late, if one goes by the original scheduled shipping. Civil War would have ended in November 2006, not February 2008, if there were no delays.

    Glass houses, Marvel, glass houses.

  20. We’re not under ordering to cut our profits… we just don’t want to take the risk… we expected higher sales on Secret Invasion and Final Crisis and it didn’t meet up… it hurts us more to have stacks of unsold material that was ordered high and didn’t pan out.

    I really wasn’t making a comment about editorial, or the talent involved… I’m enjoying both events, having a kick as a reader… just as the dude who has to pull numbers out of his ass to place the orders I really wanted some more information about Dark Reign, that’s all… I have issues with the marketing/sales department… not with anyone else…

    If I go by the numbers of similar books, and previous events, than I have to speculate low numbers anyhow… as our customers seem to be gaining in event fatigue and we’re not exactly a small store… but anyhow, we aren’t trying to hurt our profits, we’re trying to maximize our profits to what we spend, and we do that by making logical decisions based on our customers buying habits which include things like price, talent involved, and yes, the characters featured (we’re a touristy mainstream store)… all of which is vague in detail with the Dark Reign solicits

  21. Okay – my opinion. When you have been on time and delivering for the first friggn 7 issues of the series, why mess up on the 8th? Oh…theres more pages…who cares! The deal is: We can’t wait to read the end. We need to know just what the heck did they do to Janet (Wasp) to cause her to go nuclear in the last issue and where is it all going…come on Bendis/Yu…give us issue 8 on time. Oh by the way, I think that ShutupRob is a Skrull…

  22. 2 weeks. 2 … weeeksh. 2 … Bzzzt. Click. Vvvt. Vvvt. You’re in for a surprise!

    (Someone better have got that reference)

    Whatever. 2 weeks no big deal. SI and New/Mighty Avengers is frickin’ awesome baby!!!