X-Men Comics No Longer Including QR Codes After Outcry From “Unhappy” Fans

Marvel no longer includes QR codes linking to bonus pages in their X-Men books after an outcry from “unhappy” fans… Ending a conversation that’s been going on since the line relaunched earlier this year.

The news comes via this week’s edition of Brevoort’s always excellent newsletter. There, he responded to a fan asking about the lack of a QR code in Storm #1. After expressing confusion as to why Dazzler #1 included a QR code linking to a bonus page on the Marvel website, but Wolverine #1 did not, the fan also noted that they, “ended up not picking up a few books because of missing pages.”

Brevoort started his response by clarifying — again — that these are not “missing pages.” That has been backed up online by writers and artists involved in the book. While your mileage may vary as to whether the bonus pages linked by the QR codes were essential to the ongoing story or not, they were not part of the initial page count. Instead, Marvel paid the creative team for an extra page, beyond what they would normally get for crafting the issue.

Anyway, over to Brevoort, who backed this up. “Well, first off, I know that you don’t want to believe me when I say this… but none of those X-Books was missing a page,” Brevoort said. “And what this meant for Storm is that you actually got a page fewer in that title than you did on the others—because those QR code pages were bonus content, not an actual necessary part of the stories at all.”

However, it seems that after the initial outcry from fans back when the QR codes were introduced with July’s X-Men #1, the initiative was quietly shuttered a few months ago.

“In the end, though, given all of the pushback that we saw from fans on the initial ones, I simply stopped doing them for the books launching in September and later,” Brevoort continued. “Why put in the extra effort just so that fans could be unhappy with us? It didn’t make sense at that point.”

So there you go. You won’t have QR codes to kick around anymore! As previously reported, the QR code pages that were put online will likely be included in any upcoming trade collections.

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