The world of comic books is lousy with reboots these days. The New 52 initiative over at DC is probably the highest-profile example (of the titles I’ve read so far, the Aquaman relaunch is my favorite; even Koothrappali won’t be able to say “Aquaman sucks” anymore), but it’s far from the only one.

Over at Marvel, one of the newest reboot examples is Fantastic Four: Season One, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s classic by updating the team’s origin tale. It’s received mixed reviews: USA Today called it outstanding, while IGN rated it mediocre.

I’m not here to review the book, though. Instead, I’m here to review the one panel you see above.

Back in 1962, when the FF first encountered cosmic rays, news about their powers was spread by television, radio and newspapers. In Season One, news travels a lot faster: For example, Johnny Storm is the top-trending topic on Twitter and has his own website.

Except he doesn’t.

I mean, he does if you read the panel above. But just try and go to the site he names. No, seriously. Try. I’ll wait.

See?

Is it really that difficult, people?

How many writers and editors and marketers read that book and saw that panel? And you mean to tell me that no one at Marvel thought to register that domain before I did?

And they ought to be damn happy I did, by the way. Imagine if they similarly ignored a domain that was registered to a porn site — which is not at all out of the realm of possibility given the domain in question.

Worse yet, no Marvel marketer had the forethought not only to register the site, but to set up a Twitter account for Johnny Storm? For goodness sake, you’re saying he’s the top-trending topic on Twitter — and you’re not even going to get an intern to do some tweeting for him so you can add an actual social media dimension to the story you’re telling?

This seems to me to be a gigantic missed opportunity on Marvel’s part. In the Venn diagram of comic book fans and social media users, the overlap of those two circles is pretty significant. To be talking about social media components in one of your A-list releases of the year and not follow through by reflecting those components in the real world is a pretty big mistake.

But I get it: Marvel publishes dozens of titles each week. Even with their massive marketing resources, they probably don’t have the time to dot every I and cross every T, much less create a full-on social media initiative. Fine. At the very least, then, spend the six bucks it requires to register the domain and redirect it to the Fantastic Four page of the Marvel Universe Wiki.

Epic fail. ‘Nuff said.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re going to use a fictional web address in some piece of published material, make sure you own that domain. Then actually do something with it. Otherwise, what’s the point?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 8:00 am and is filed under Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways, Rants 'n' Such, Social Media.