What’s worse than spending $120,000 to promote a video game that spent 15-years in development? Spending that much on a Twitter trend, only to have everyone think it’s about school spirit.

That’s what happened yesterday, when 2K Games dropped 120 grand on a promoted #alwaysbetonduke hashtag. It was intended to promote “Duke Nukem Forever”, a terrible first-person shooter that sort of plays like a Leisure Suit Larry mod of Half Life 2, but it ended up cramming the site full of pro-Duke University tweets. How bad did it get? Well, not Cherokee Parks bad, but bad enough that Duke had to explain it on their news Twitter, should too many people start associating Duke’s “Mighty Foot” with the University. That’d probably work better with UNC.

Huh. Why wouldn’t Duke University want to be associated with a game with a “capture the babe” mode, where you throw a woman over your shoulder and slap her on the ass to keep her from “freaking out”?

Well, the hashtag promotion didn’t work and all the reviews for Duke Nukem are terrible, so we can chalk this up as the worst Twitter promotion since the Demon Deacons paid for #wakeforest and ended up selling a million copies of Kirby’s Dreamland.

Comic books and sports have had a relationship for years, in which readers of one were shoved into lockers and given swirlies by the participants of the other. However, that doesn’t mean the two can’t join forces in an unholy abomination that makes both parties look absolutely ridiculous. Like if ESPN the Magazine hired Marvel artists to draw fictitious comic book covers for every NBA team, for example. That would be completely insane and stupid.

These events and other highlights are depicted in the November edition of ESPN The Magazine by Marvel artists including Olivier Coipel, Leinil Francis Yu, J. Scott Campbell, Terry Dodson, Kaare Andrews, John Romita Sr., and Marvel Editor-In-Chief, Joe Quesada. Quesada did the honors on the cover of this issue for ESPN. Perhaps not so coincidently, elements of Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, all stars of the upcoming Avengers film as well as their own, appear on the cover. –Comics Alliance

You can find screen caps of all the covers over at Comics Alliance and, to be fair, the artwork is impressive. That being said, the last thing in the world the NBA needs is to have its players likened to superheroes. I’m already sick of LeBron’s enormous ego. If Nike puts out a commercial of him leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, I’ll be hard pressed not to find the closest sharp thing I can find and gouge out my eyes.