That is true, but then again, there are many facets to consider. Would there have been a bean-counting obsession with renumbering many decades ago, for example?

That seems like a modern phenomena.

Only because in past decades mail subsciptions were a bigger portion of the sales and postal regulations in the US worked against low numbered titles. You couldn't qualify for cheaper shipping unless you had a certain number of issues of a periodical published, which is why publishers often used old title numbering to start new series. It was still a "bean counter" decision, but the market was different as to what decision they made.

-M

PS the collector market also hadn't yet been established and their fetishization of #1 issues, that started int he 70s. Look at some of the ads in Bronze Age comics selling comics, things like Heroes World selling sets of #1 issues and marketing them as collector's items. Once sales patterns conformed to the marketing, #1 issues became much more prevalent. Its bean counters reacitng to customer buying patterns.

Again comics fans get the comics their buying patterns deserve.

Right. It's not that educated, determined shoppers can't figure out how all the myriad TPB interface with each other. It's that every additional obstacle between the shelf and the cash register drops buyers and results in lower sales.

Marvel is re-releasing old work in an "Epic Collection" line which uses the Epic Comics logo for material that was published by Marvel Comics. Confusing! And then they are skipping broad sections. Check out this confusing library of current (and near future) titles:



DC on the other hand lets me have:

And the titles attached to the epic books are random titles. I don't think the original stories had those titles.
In the FF Epic book " All in the family" I have no clue what issues they are, And I have the entire run in one form or another.

You know what potential customers like even less than doing homework? Trying to find a a niche specialty shop that carries a product they don't even know they want yet and will never see unless they make that special trip, oh and even if they manage to find and drive to such a shop, chances are they will be told you would have had to special order it three months before it was released to get a copy. But yeah, numbering is why new customers aren't buying in to comics.

And comic fans (lapsed or current), who will track 80 years of stories to find the exact panel that explains why hype man's uniform was green in this story rather than blue without it just being a colorist error bit explaining it's narrative purpose or can name 112 different types of kryptonite and what they do then say they don't like to do homework to be able to read new comics? I find that a bit surreal.

The problem isn't numbering or homework, the simple core of the problem is the industry going all in on the direct market and the hardcore fan customer base 30+ years ago without a feeder mechanism to continue to make comics available to new readers and now that they've gone 2+ generations without bringing in new readers to replenish their customer base while the hardcore base has aged out, died off, checked out because of career, kids, or other real life things becoming higher priority, and other matters of natural attrition to a fanbase, they no longer have the infrastructure in place or the catalog of material or formats that can reach and appeal to new customers in the current 21st century marketplace and there isn't a large enough remnant of the hardcore customer base to make any growth possible. They aren't reaching new potential customers for numbering to be an obstacle. They may be alienating existing customers, but there aren't enough existing customers for any kind of sustainable growth, it's now all about getting a larger slice of a shrinking pie and flooding the market with as much product of any quality to milk as much revenue as you can from the existing customer base. And there isn't enough of a viable future in print for them to make the kind of capital investment necessary to creating the new type infrastructure needed to reach new customer sand the markets they exist in. Comics in general are undergoing a huge surge in sales to new customers, just not direct market comics. Things like Dog Boy, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the Raina Telgmeier books are seeing massive sales and sustainable growth, but they rarely sell in comic shops, they sell at Target, Wal*Mart, grocery stores, Amazon, etc. and they sell because they are in a format that appeals to modern readers, in a market that is accessible to them, priced so they are in the impulse buy sticker price range, and provide a complete entertainment experience for the reader without having to do anything else by buy and read the book.

Comics are a niche product sold in dinosaur formats, in retail ghettos where new customers don't go unless they are already regular comics purchasers and which do not exist at all in large areas of the United States (approximately 5000 retail Diamond accounts spread out over 50 states, and not evenly spread out either-there are 23 Diamond retail accounts within a 45 minute drive of me all within 2 metropolitan areas within 1 state, meaning there are other areas with zero retail accounts present to sell to potential customers). Numbering is not the reason they are not selling to new or lapsed customers. It's not even in the top 100 obstacles for achieving sales growth the industry is facing. It's a byproduct of abandoning the mass market to appeal to the hardcore fanboy customer base for sure, but fixing numbering issues wouldn't even produce a register-able uptick in sales for the industry because all those potential customers who never see comics now, would never see comics with the so called numbering issues fixed. And you can't sell product to customers who never see it no matter how it's numbered.


-M