When Marketing and Comics Collide

So, today I went to a bargain store and got two grab bags of comics for ten bucks. I wasn’t expecting too much when I got them, no mint condition first issues worth thousands or anything like that. I did find quite a treasure, though. Sometimes, as a marketing ploy, various institutes will attempt to make comic books as a way to attract a younger audience, and in the year 2000, NASCAR and Coke did just that. What they made was possibly the worst named comic book ever, Race Warrior. Of course the title wasn’t the only thing wrong with this book.  Come with me as I guide you through an example of marketing gone bad.

The issue number I have is five, so I missed a good bit of the story, but it takes place in the year 2020 and it involves the NASCAR team Racewarrior and the disappearance of driver Zax Hammer and technician Augusta Wind (oh yeah, they use puns because marketing people don’t have souls).  So Zax Hammer has been missing for about six months and it is implied that the head of Team Racewarrior, Dr. Racsan (yeah, they spelled NASCAR backwards), has something to do with it. After the disappearance, Zax’s nephew, the wheelchair bound Speedster, is on a quest to find out what happened to his uncle.

In this story, we see the introduction of a new mystery driver of Zax’s old Sunkist car. Possibly the most impressive thing about this comic is that there is not a single page that doesn’t include some kind of advertising from 7Up, Sunkist, Ford, Valvoline, or NASCAR or soda related. The antagonist of the story is the driver of the 7 Up car, Ty Rodd (…..), the leader of the NASCAR racing circuit.  He is revealed to be in cahoots with Mr. Gosolow, a man who has great ambitions, one of which is to own all of NASCAR through Rodd’s winnings.  Of course, gaining control of NASCAR is only “phase one” of his sinister plan. Phase two is information that Ty is not privy to at this point in the story.

The big conflict of the story comes on the day of the “New Chicago Superlooper” race. This is the reveal of the new driver, who qualifies for pole position and goes head to head with Ty Rodd. There are five pages dedicated to going in circles and some minor car crashes, which really don’t translate the excitement of the real thing. Worst of all, as the Sunkist car takes the lead; he pulls up into a truck on the track and is out of the race. Just want to point this out, this is a ring track and for some reason a Mac truck is allowed to pull on to the track, load up a stock car and just leave. The story ends with Ty Rodd’s ego being hurt and the mystery driver getting out of limo, angry that he wasn’t allowed to win. A shadowy figure tells him that now is not the time to win races. Then we end the comic with a horribly deformed drawing of Speedster vowing to find out what happened to his poorly named loved ones.

I don’t want to offend any NASCAR or left turning enthusiasts out there, but this comic is boring as hell. I will give the sponsors credit for trying to gain interest in NASCAR by not only showing the “excitement” of a race, but showing where they think the sport could go. In the future, NASCAR will include short cut tubes and tunnels that don’t connect with the road at the end, but rather send the car airborne, because at 200 mph that’s what you want to do; fly. Also, in the future NASCAR fans will wear Virtual Reality goggles at an actual sporting event.

All of this is just terrible. It hurts the comic book medium. At no point would you consider The Great Gatsby literature if you saw Pizza Hut or McDonald’s every other page. I know it happens quite a lot, and I understand the appeal of companies trying to use this medium as a marketing tool, but it’d be nice if they just approached it with some respect. This is just shameless promotion and for skeptics it could be used as an example of how useless comic books can be as a learning tool. As a final insult to readers, the cover art suggests that the family of Zax will find out his new identity in this issue, which they don’t. There is just too much to complain about, but if nothing else we can all have a good laugh at their poorly chosen title.