This is an odd little ad on Robot 6.

So, I’m reading Robot 6 this morning and the above ad catches my eye. Alongside The Boys and Project Superpowers, Dynamite Entertainment publishes a fair amount of licensed work and material based on established IP, stuff like Battlestar Galactica and the new Sherlock Holmes comic. One of the works it doesn’t have the license to, however, is Star Trek, which is currently being handled by IDW, and as I’ve discussed before, you shouldn’t advertise what’s not yours.

So why does this ad feature Jim Kirk and Spock with a big Dynamite Entertainment logo? Because Dynamic Forces is running a collector’s show featuring Star Trek on QVC a week in the past¹.

The relationship between Dynamite Entertainment (who makes comic books) and its parent company Dynamic Forces (offering collectible comic books and tchochkes) is fairly well known, but this is just plain confusing to the audience. I clicked on the ad because I wondered if Dynamite had gotten a license to NuTrek while IDW kept the older material, similar to way that Malibu and DC each published DS9 and TNG comics in the 90s, not because I was interested in getting a Vulcan Science Academy Spork² set, autographed by Zachary Quinto. This is just an embarrassing, sloppy mistake that shouldn’t have gotten as far as it did. While I’ve got no doubt that the companies share marketing resources, this should have been caught immediately, not by a third party when it was on a major blog a week after the fact.

¹ With time travel being essential to the plot of the new Star Trek movie, I’m going to assume this was intentional.

²The Spork is the most logical of eating utensils and its name honors Surak, so stop making that face.