Buy This Comic Or We'll Shoot This Teleporting Dog

Dan Slott uses this Newsarama interview to a) call attention to the dire sales straits in which his Ben Grimm solo title finds itself, and b) launch a “Pull My Thing” contest in which one lucky winner will win both an original page of Andrea DiVito Thing art and a collection of signed Slott paperbacks. In Mr. Slott’s own words...

There’s one grand prize, the whole kit-and-kaboodle, and it’s going to the best pitchman on the message boards! We need people pounding the virtual-beat, getting the word out about our pull list campaign, and letting people know what they like about the title. I’ll be scouring all the boards and declaring a winner by the end of June.

What I’m looking for is the person who’s doing the best job promoting “Pull My Thing and Win a Prize” -- but without being pushy or derailing any threads. And you gotta bring the love [laughs].

It is kind of surprising that a book starring one of Marvel’s flagship characters apparently hasn’t fared so well with retailers. Bashful Benjy certainly has a lot of potential – aside from his adventures with the Fantastic Four and on his own, he’s been a football star, war hero, test pilot, astronaut, and now billionaire. What’s good about his solo title, though, is Dan Slott’s awareness of that potential, combined with the willingness to exploit it for entertaining stories. The first story arc co-starred Iron Man and Nighthawk, along with scads of cameos; and the recent Lockjaw issue had the canine Inhuman come to live with Ben. As with his other Marvel work, Slott knows how to incorporate Marvel’s shared-universe dictates into his stories without them overwhelming the story he wants to tell. Indeed, that’s part of the book’s overture to readers – Ben as Marvel’s Kevin Bacon, the guy everybody knows.

Slott’s stories are complemented well by the clean lines of Andrea DiVito, whose work reminds me of recent Thing artists Scott Kolins and Mike Wieringo. DiVito’s style allows Ben’s rocky, monstrous form to exist alongside pastiches of Paris Hilton and Martha Stewart without one extreme excluding the other. I would work in some observations about this mirroring Ben’s struggle to be accepted despite his appearance, but that particular subplot isn’t as prominent as it used to be.

Instead, Slott and DiVito are content merely to tell fun, straightforward, “traditional” superhero stories about life as a rich orange rock-monster in the middle of the world’s most superpower-centric city. For Slott, Ben Grimm is the quintessential Marvel character, and The Thing aims to be a quintessential Marvel comic. Still, don’t take my word for it – try it for yourself.

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