I got the Day-by-Day Calendar Company’s Marvel Comics desk calendar as a gift this year.
All in all, it’s a real beauty, just look at the amazing reproduction of today’s page.
I’ll tell you what, it’s hard concentrating at work when you’ve got an image like this sitting on your desk. I had to mop up the drool every 15 minutes.
And while it’s a nice looking calendar, there’s still a few problems with it.
First off, the selection of images and subjects is ridiculously weighted. It seems that it’s about 50 percent X-Men related material. That means that the Avengers, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil and the Fantastic Four are all scrunched into the other 182.5 days of the year. Sure, the X-Men are big, but they sure aren’t all that Marvel has to offer. Heck, even all those other guys aren’t all that Marvel has to offer! They’ve got thousands of characters and covers worth featuring. In fact, the more obscure this calendar got, the better it would be!
Along those lines, the writer of the calendar trivia should have loaded it up with Invincible Iron Man and Incredible Hulk information, since both of those Marvel movies are slated to come out this year. It probably would have even been possible to time entries with the film release dates.
Above all, the most annoying thing about the calendar is that when the layout artists use word balloons. They do them all wrong. Look at Emma Frost’s entry above. As the first balloon transistions into the next balloon, the sentence actually jumps from one balloon to the other — just like a newspaper article off the front page. This particular page is especially bad because in the first balloon, you get the first word of the next sentence, and then the rest of it continues in the following balloon!
It’s like they only have a one-size-fits-all bubble.
That’s just bad comic-book form, fellas!
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