If you are regular reader of this blog, you know that spelling is not one of my strong suits. Chances are if you are in the habit of reading my blog and you have never noticed any misspelled words, it’s probably because my lovely wife has already read what I wrote and corrected my mistakes before you got a chance to see it. She’s really good about that.
That’s why I can’t believe what I did today. I actually criticized the spelling of someone else. Not just anybody, but an actual editor for Marvel Comics. A guy that feeds his family by correcting the mistakes of others. It’s how he makes his living.
I was reading a Blog@Newsarama post that linked to a blog post written by Marvel Comics Tom Brevoort. He was trying to defend the fact that CIVIL WAR #1 actually won a Harvey Award. This is from Tom Brevoort’s blog post:
I know it’s not popular to believe, especially online, but plenty of people really did like CIVIL WAR–both readers and retailers. And while it certainly had no pretentions towards being “art”, it was very much dedicated to being a crackling good super hero story. And people responded to it, in a way they haven’t to anything else the majors have produced in the past few years. That’s the reality–get over it.
Though I found most of the above to be ridiculous, what really got my attention was Brevoort’s use of “super hero”. I thought it was superhero. As in one word. Not two. Tom Brevoort was the editor of Marvel’s CIVIL WAR. In CIVIL WAR, it’s one word - superhero. If it was constantly expressed as one word in CIVIL WAR, why then did Brevoort write it as two words in his blog post? It seemed, I don’t know, inconsistent.
I then remembered what I hated most about CIVIL WAR. It was the inconsistency.
For example, in CIVIL WAR #4 we see Sue Richards leaving her husband Reed Richards in the middle of the night. She didn’t tell him that she was leaving him. She wrote him a note. In FANTASTIC FOUR #540, we see Sue Richards leaving her husband in a much different way. They have a huge knockdown argument that culminates in Sue leaving Reed. There is no note and we don’t see her slinking off into the night.
The two events did not match. They were inconsistent.
I left a comment on the Blog@Newsarama pointing out Brevoort’s use of “super hero” instead of “superhero”. I was taken to task for pointing this out because it seems either “super hero” or “superhero” is correct. In fact, it can even be hyphenated. I guess that is correct. It can be properly conveyed either way.
It was the consistency I was questioning.
Update: I totally forgot about something until DJ Sloofus made mention of it in the comment section. Marvel and DC Comics jointly own the trademark to the word “SUPERHERO”. Not “Super Hero”. Not “Super-Hero”. They actually legally own the word “SUPERHERO”.
That’s a pretty lackadaisical attitude towards the term, especially considering the company he works for felt so strongly about it that they had it copyrighted. Technically, he also fucked up a comma in the above passage. It should be within the quotation marks; not outside of them.