The Marvel/Audi cross-over comic appeared in my Facebook feed this week. For those who haven’t seen it yet – presumably because you haven’t yet trained the Facebook algorithm to show you the geekiest damn thing possible at any given time – the short version is this: Audi has a lot of product placement in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War film. They are building on that.
Part of the way they’re building off that is a custom, eight-page Avengers comic that places Audi cars front and centre. You can read it online, for free, ’cause there is no point in trying to get people to pay for that shit.
There is nothing particularly mind-bending about the comic. In fact, it’s exactly what you’re expecting from the concept: the barest minimum of a storyline, character beats that remind you that you’ve been watching movies with all these characters in them, and a couple of really on-the-nose moments where they talk about the technology in their cars and Black Panther being king of the road.
What’s fascinating is the comic’s existence.
I mean, it’s not like this is new idea. I knew Hostess Fruit Pies were a thing as a kid, despite the fact that they were never sold in Australia, simply because there were a series of Fruit Pie strips in my comics where Spiderman or Captain America fought a particularly cheesy villain, defeating them by the application of snack foods.
It makes me particularly happy you can find all these strips online now.
But in the space of thirty years, that kind of product placement has moved from snack food aimed at pre-teens to high-performance luxury cars.
If you ever need a representative example of how pervasive the spread of geek culture has gotten, that is probably it.
