"I stopped reading X-Men about the same time they started putting Wolverine on the cover of comics in which he didn't actually, technically, appear."
Superhero teams in comic books constantly change. Characters join and leave so often that any given superhero team is often unrecognizable within a year. Other superhero teams have a
Heroes Unlimited setup, where there are
Loads And Loads Of Characters and no two issues will have the same group of characters. As a result, there are a lot more fans of particular comic-book characters than there are fans of particular comic-book teams or comic-book titles. Fans will like a new team book not if it has a name they recognize, but if it has characters they recognize. A new title will often sell based on whether it has already-popular characters in it, and existing characters will often be made more or less powerful based on how popular they are with readers.
This leads to one of the most overused tricks in comic-book marketing. When a character is very popular, they will often get
Wolverine Publicity: appearing in every comic book title and format possible until the fans get sick of them. The character will often have a flood of mini-series which desperately search for something new to do with them ("in this issue, Wolverine visits Turkmenistan!").
The next step of
Wolverine Publicity is random cameos to drive other titles. The promoted character will appear in the first issue of every new title, and appear in old titles with flagging sales, regardless of whether the promoted character makes any sense there. Particularly shameless marketers will just slap the promoted character on the cover and have them appear for one panel in the issue. They will often suffer from
The Worf Effect; a new character hasn't "made it" unless they can thrash the most important character in the universe.
If a team has multiple titles, with different members in each one, the promoted character will somehow manage to appear in both titles -- even if the two stories are supposed to be happening at the same time.
See
The Over Used Recurring Character for the TV equivalent (although
Wolverine Publicity often applies to main characters as well, who somehow become more main than others).
Examples:
Comic Books
- The Marvel Comics character Wolverine (for whom this trope is named) is the worst offender, hands down. He's been so over-used that his more recent appearances are prone to parody and Lampshade Hanging. (In an issue of New X-Men, a character mentions that Wolverine is the only mutant who finds time to be on all three X-Men teams at once.) By the end of the 1990s, Wolverine had been paired up with practically every other Marvel hero in existence, all the way down to five-year-old Katie Power of The Power Pack. Twice.
- Even Marvel recognized how absurd it was getting when their humor/parody comic What The?! in the late 1980s referenced Wolverine just trying to have a quiet day of fishing and going insane because of all the other characters popping up to get him to guest-star.
- Also lampshaded in the current arc of New Avengers. After discovering that Elektra had at some point been replaced by a Skrull they discuss who else might have been substituted, with Wolverine himself pointing out that his ability to be on so many teams at once seemed ridiculous... unless he was trying to infiltrate as many as possible.
- Wolverine even shows up in, of all places, the Ultimate Spiderman video game, as one of the boss battles for Venom.
- And from Runaways:
Iron Man: "How novel. A Wolverine appearance. Seriously, this is the third time I've run into you this week..."
- And in Deadpool, where Wolverine's appearance in issue 27 was declared "his most gratuitous guest appearance ever!" right on the cover.
- This ''House of M'' parody cartoon
takes a shot at it, too.
Cyclops: Since when are you in the Avengers anyway, Wolverine?
Wolverine: I was getting bored only being on three teams while having my own solo adventures. A guy's got to live a little.
- One cover of X-Statix actually has Wolverine bare claws for the camera and say "I'm only doin' this to increase sales." Amazingly, this was revealed to be the first panel of the story, in which he legitimately was appearing in the issue.
- In the Silver Age of the Marvel Universe, virtually any character who was supposed to get their own title would either appear in Spider Man first, or have Spider-Man appear in their title's first issue.
- This extends to the current age, where C-lister Gravity finds Spider-Man watching him fight his nemesis, and he doesn't lift a single finger to help .
- There's a phrase to refer to most of Marvel's Silver Age that basically amounted to "Spider-Man is in the third issue". Trades soliciting comics to shop owners would often carry a picture of the title's third issue's cover. Thus, Spider-Man wound up on a huge number of these, encouraging owners to feel that at least up to that issue the title would be a sure seller. In the nineties, replace Spidey with Wolvie, and it still works.
- This even happened with the Marvel Transformers series which had the alien suit Spidy appear before being retconned away later.
- The villain Venom from the Spider Man comic was so popular that he was turned into a Nineties Anti Hero, then given endless cameos and mini-series. When he began to feel over-exposed, the writers created the new character Carnage (a Darker And Edgier version of Venom) and repeated the process all over again.
- This troper has noticed that a lot of people now hate Venom and Wolverine because of their constant overuse, creating a form of Hype Backlash against them.
- This is not exclusive to Marvel, but they are the biggest abusers. Superman has sometimes been used this way, especially when he always turns up in a flagging new series starring an untested character.
- As has Batman. Just about any new ongoing series in recent years will have an appearance by one or both of them before the first year is up.
- A common theme will be Superman for the most part being supportive of the new hero, while Batman will be a bit more suspicious.
- Nineties Anti Hero Lobo has also been used in this way. One Superman cover had the strapline "In this issue: Lobo appears on one page!"
- Gambit of the X-Men followed in Wolverine's wandering footsteps for a while too.
- In 1991 Marvel parodied their own tendency to do this with a three part Fantastic Four story headlined "The World's Most Commercial Comics Magazine'' which starred Wolverine and Spider-Man, as well as the then-hot Ghost Rider and Gray Hulk. And also had an unnecessary cameo by the Punisher.
- New Avengers #35 is the perfect example of how Covers Always Lie [1]◊
Live Action TV
- This actually happened to live-action sitcoms on ABC, with Steve Urkel, at the height of his popularity, being crossed over onto almost every show in the TGIF lineup at one point or another.
- When it was still around, one special has Sabrina The Teenage Witch chasing Salem across various T.G.I.F shows, including Teen Angel, You Wish, and even the non-supernatural teen show Boy Meets World.
- Two Words: John Munch.
- Blunt: The Fourth Man was a British TV movie from the '80s. The video was released in the late '90s or the 21st century. Anthony Hopkins's face featured prominently on the cover. When I watched it, I saw that Ian Richardson played the eponymous Blunt, the main character, while Hopkins played someone else. But then Richardson never played a cannibal (or at least not Lecter).
Videogames
- In Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, almost all chapters prominently feature Rena in the cover. Specially those that have nothing to do with her.
- She is missing only in Meakashi-hen and Minagoroshi-hen (And Rei, if that counts). That's 2 out of 8, people!
