After decades, and plenty of buzzy headlines concerning both their comics and their movies and television shows, DC and Marvel are finally crossing over again. Their most popular characters are crossing over in a string of one-shot comic specials, beginning with a two-part crossover between Batman and Deadpool.
Marvel’s half of the event, Deadpool/Batman #1, is finally released today, after months of fans speculating and debating about how its combination of characters would interact with each other. But the rollout of this book is a little… atypical, which makes sense for a story that’s this big.
At the time of this writing, Deadpool/Batman #1 is not available on the usual digital comic platforms like Comixology, and does not have a confirmed release date in that format. This means that it will only be available in physical copies, which you can either get through Marvel’s mail-order subscriptions or through brick-and-mortar comic shops.
This part of the Deadpool/Batman rollout was definitely a surprise to me, as I was fully prepared to read the digital copy and dissect the highlights of it for you in this article, and then pick up a physical copy from my trusty local comic shop later this week. But the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s an inspired choice, especially for something as significant as the Big Two’s first inter-company crossover in years.
A classic way to avoid spoilers
For anyone who is even passively involved with online comics fandom, spoilers on release day are unavoidable. Any length of scrolling through social media will inevitably lead to you being served panels or pages from the week’s newest books, sometimes with the appropriate spoiler warnings and tags, and sometimes completely without. And while some of these posts contain actual nuanced discussions about certain plot points and character moments, a lot are completely devoid of context. It often gets to a point of entire fandoms taking certain panels or scenes and running with them, having a knee-jerk reaction to something that… they haven’t even actually read in its entirety yet.
In truth, this already happened with Deadpool/Batman #1 in the days leading up to its release, after at least one comic shop employee took photos of an in-hand physical copy and posted them online. Select panels or sequences quickly caught like wildfire online (and in some cases, started discourse), even though practically no one in the conversation had actually read the entire issue yet.
If Deadpool/Batman #1 had been available in digital form today, that conversation would have ballooned even further, with people now getting to post high-quality screenshots from the entire thing. It would’ve been a level of attention that this book is worthy of (again, we haven’t had a proper crossover like this in a long while), but it would’ve also spoiled the reading experience of anyone who couldn’t immediately pick up a copy.
Instead, having Deadpool/Batman #1 only be available in physical copies (for now) adds a mystique to everything. Fans still have ways to talk about the issue online, but the actual experience of reading the issue and properly looking at the art is able to be preserved for however the individual reader wants it. I can go into reading Green Arrow and Daredevil’s meet-up, or the sure-to-be-adorable interaction between Krypto and Jeff the Land Shark, unencumbered by other people’s thoughts on the Internet.
It also incentivizes curious fans to actually go support their local comic shop, which is a godsend given the way the industry has evolved just within the course of the past decade. It’s not quite how a kid might’ve felt while reading Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man in 1976, or even the massive DC vs. Marvel event in 1996, since neither of those generations were trapped in the social media age like we are. But, it’s pretty close.
(featured image: Marvel/DC)
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