Guitar Hero Mobile gets weird product placement in Marvel comic.

By Joe Fourhman | April 12, 2008

In this month’s issue of “Fantastic Four,” readers are greeted by an amazingly bad example of product placement: a dude in a Guitar Hero III Mobile t-shirt.

This sort of thing isn’t entirely new in the world of funnybooks, but as a fan of both comics and gaming, I can tell you that this particular example is lousy. As a gamer, I’m pretty well convinced that Guitar Hero Mobile is a terrible idea. However, Guitar Hero itself is not (or at least, it wasn’t)… so seeing a specifically Mobile logo as opposed to a regular GH logo is off-putting and reeks of paid endorsement.

My speculation: It is probably entirely likely that the current Fantastic Four creative team wanted to include a Guitar Hero shout-out because they’re fans and the game is a hip property. But when they contacted Activision’s Marketing Brigade - licensors of such amazing high-quality products as the Guitar Hero Air Guitar Belt Buckle and Guitar Hero LCD edition - they were told they have to use the Mobile logo because that’s what the Brigade wants to push right now. And using the GH: Aerosmith logo would require some advanced copyright finagling with Steven Tyler’s signature on a hundred documents. But that’s just me making stuff up. Maybe Activision contacted Marvel Comics and this was what they came up with.

If only they didn’t use the Mobile logo. They could have saved their street cred.

The full, unmolested panel (note that the logo is also seen in the panel above!):

This is from issue #556, June 2008. In case you’re interested, the Human Torch has signed on to do a reality TV show, and that’s what Mr. Guitar Hero Mobile Fan is referring to. Torch spent the night sleeping with some random female villain, which is why he’s grumpy.

And yes, no comics fan is ever impressed when a crisp corporate logo is clumsily Photoshopped into line art.