During a number of television shows this weekend on ITV, the following commercial has been running;

This is the time of year when we start to get advertising for "partworks", a publishing format that sees newsagents, supermarkets and news stands filled with the first issues of ongoing collectable magazines, serialising something or other along with an item of sorts that will "build up week by week". Airfix plane kits, knitting patterns, Star Trek encylopaedias, there's a partwork for it, the first issue often at a reduced price with a binder of sorts. Usually the magazine fades from the stands after a few weeks, relying on subscriptions for the die hards to keep the magazine going. The Eaglemoss superhero lines for Marvel and DC lead figurines made history as the only UK partwork magazine to be sold in America.

Well, now we are getting a collection of regular hardcover marvel graphic novels at a lower price, starting with JMS and JrJr's Spider-Man Coming Home for £2.99 with a bevy of free gifts – a bag, bookends and the like, to collect.

And advertised with a prominence beyond any comic book in the English speaking world. Prime time national network TV advertising over Christmas and the New Year, with shows that get millions of viewers.

Here's the website for the partwork in question…

Publisher Hachette trialled this earlier in the year, but it was considered abandoned. National network TV advertising is the opposite of that…