Some X-Men comics now feature a QR code in the back of the book that hides a “bonus page.” These new hidden pages have set off a large debate online among comic readers and fans over what counts as bonus content and comic preservation.
If you look online right now, you’ll find people suggesting that Marvel is going to be locking the last page of all future comics behind a QR code. That’s a pretty wild claim! As such, some of these tweets have gone semi-viral among comic book fans, leading to a lot of people assuming that this is the case. However, that’s not quite the full story here, even if the truth is still a controversial mess that’s led to a lot of online debate.
Earlier this month, Marvel started doing something different with some of its new X-Men-related comics. At the very end of July 10’s X-Men #1 by Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman, readers encountered a large QR code printed on one of the last pages. If you were to scan this code you’d unlock a bonus comic page teasing future events or villains. (In the case of X-Men #1 it revealed more information about a new group of baddies introduced in the comic.) This QR code bonus page popped up in some other recent X-Men comics.
Why Marvel is doing QR-hidden bonus pages in X-Men
According to Marvel Comics VP Executive Editor Tom Brevoort, this isn’t the comic company cutting content from books, but instead adding a bit of extra content while avoiding spoilers, as he explained on his personal Substack.
[The QR code page] was a bonus page to begin with, an extra page—we didn’t scale back the contents of X-Men #1 in order to do it,” said Brevoort. “And it gave us a page whose contents we could conceal until the day of release, thus avoiding any early spoilers.”
The editor also confirmed that Marvel was going to be doing similar QR bonus pages in future X-Men comic launches as a sort of a “modern-day equivalent of that ‘Things To Come’ page that ran in the first issue of the Claremont/Lee X-Men #1.”
So this isn’t a case of Marvel cutting the last page from a book and hiding it behind a QR code—as comic book writers have confirmed—instead, it’s a bonus page, something extra.
However, some fans don’t agree. They see these bonus pages as important to the overall story and as such these “extras” are indeed the last pages of a comic book. It doesn’t help that one of these QR pages wasn’t available when the comic was first sold. I also understand folks not wanting to read comic pages on their tiny phone screens when they have spent money on an actual physical comic book to add to their collection. It’s weird and not ideal.
There is some good news. According to Brevoort, when these issues are collated together for a later release—as Marvel always does with comics—the bonus pages will be included and not hidden behind a QR code.
This means that decades from now, people won’t have to hope a URL is still working to see one more page in a physical comic book. The Marvel editor even suggested that if they do a second printing of a comic with a QR code page, they might include that bonus page in the comic instead, as at that point spoilers won’t matter.
That’s all nice to hear and should mean that comic preservationists won’t have to print off a digital page from a website to preserve history.
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