Read my earlier posts. I don't wish to repeat myself. 

Exactly, hence why it was not a valid comparison.

There isn't the "homework" involved, not like working out which Darth Vader volume to buy. I know the episode titles of any TV shows I am interested in, plus modern TV is about starting at the beginning. For shows that are casual, and don't follow an arc, one can easily find an episode.

I am not interested in comparing apples and oranges.

Why did they do that? 

Oh, it got worse than that.  I swear they were using unreal numbers, like 17.X.  This is one of those things where, when the human race is extinct and the giant mutant groundhogs have taken over, they will look at how we numbered our comics and say "Yeah, they probably deserved it."   

Regarding barriers, that is the point I was making in the various posts within this thread.

I enjoyed the Aquaman movie. I have read little of Black Manta and Ocean Master. Now I want to read more of them. I know what to look for and where. I look forward to reading some Black Manta and Ocean Master tales.

As a long-time fan, I wonder, could there be people experiencing Aquaman for the first time - and who also want to track down his exploits in comic form?

If it is a person who has ONLY seen the films, but who now wants to check out the comics, that should be as easy as possible. So, let's imagine they go into their LCS and ask for an Aquaman trade featuring Black Manta and/or Ocean Master. And let's imagine they are given one. And that they enjoy it. But now imagine that they try and follow it but the confusion discussed in this topic leads to them dropping the books.

I'm not saying that would happen (or is happening with Aquaman trades), just that they could happen.

"Hmmm, I enjoyed that last Aquaman trade - Volume 3 - but what's the next one? I've lost track of the volume numbers. Hang on, why is there another Volume 1? Does it tie in to the last volume I read?"

Hypothetical (possibly), but not impossible. I've experienced it. I've had casual readers online asking me for advice on numbering. It's a barrier the industry could and should do without.

If publishers wanted to capitalize on movies to generate sales, they would be well served to have a kiosk that sells trades or have them available at the concession stand in the theatres themselves. Or have some kind of pop up store in the theatre on the first few weeks of a movie's release (DC has done some larger scale pop up stores in places like the National Mall in Washington DC and at South by Southwest Festival last year, and Valiant paid retailers to have booths at Lolopalooza dates a few years back to sell Valiant books, but nothing coordinated with releases in other media). But a movie goer is highly unlikely to take the time to research (many here have said they don't want to take time to do any research and it is a barrier so having to research where you can buy stuff is a huge barrier that precedes any other possible barrier) where they could find comics to buy, take the time to drive there, and then find, the retailer probably doesn't have much available in stock because he buys everything on a returnable basis and 80% of his buy in is done at a volume to sell through in the first week after its release so he can afford to pay the next Diamond shipment because it is non-returnable and 90% of his customer traffic is regulars who only but the current week's releases.

I will give DC this much-their Wal Mart exclusive 100 page giants are in a place where people can get them, offer a lot of content for the $5 price tag (3 reprinted comics and 1 12 page original comic) and are filled with house ads that basically say if you like X feature in this book, you can find more in these trades...showing a picture of the first volume of both the new 52 version and the rebirth volume and listing future volumes in each series by title and providing the Comic Shop Locator info in the ad as an option (as well as suggesting online booksellers without mentioning names) as ways to find the books. It's baby steps and very likely far too little far too late, but it is the kind of thing the industry should have been doing to bring in new generations of readers long, long ago. They've lost at least 2, and by now possibly 3 generations of potential new readers by not being readily available to them when they were young readers, which is why sales are historically low now as there has not been a flow of new customers to replace the attrition of old customers that has always been there.

The industry made a decision to leave behind the inefficient newsstand that didn't want them because of low profitability on sales of comics and double down on the guaranteed revenue of the direct market and retailers and customers who did. But it was a decision that was short sighted. Customers aren't leaving comics now at a significantly higher rate then they did in the Silver Age or Bronze Age or in the 90s, but they are coming in at a significantly lower rate than they did in those eras because there is no infrastructure in place any longer for people to actually discover comic books themselves unless they overcame the barriers of knowing where to find them and were able to get there (remember comic shops do not exist in large swaths of the country so there are large areas, typically rural, where kids have zero chance to discover comics at all, and even in places where the do exist, you have to be looking for comics to discover them. So customer attrition stayed fairly constant while customer influx declined, because the direct market provided no mechanism to bring in new readers. And now 25-30 years on, we are seeing the effects of some old customers leaving for 30 years without a steady supply of new customers to replace them that had existed in the comic marketplace until they went into the direct market ghetto. The result is the historically low sale of units we see now, not something that occurred overnight or because of reboots, numbering issues, variant covers, etc. but something that was an unintended consequence (but not unpredictable if one had looked at at actual sales patterns of customer attrition) of the creation of direct market exclusivity and the focus on the existing customer base of hardcore comic fans.

Yes, there are barriers to new readers getting into comics. Numbering however, doesn't even make the list of top 25 barriers. And changing numbering to satisfy the preferences of hardcore fans is going to do jack-all to remedy the barriers that have kept 2-3 generations of new readers form buying into comics. Comics are actually in an amazing growth period right now. The big book publishers are adding graphic novel imprints and experiencing rapid sales growth in the book market selling those graphic novels. What's not seeing any growth are direct market super-hero comics sold in serialized periodical or even serialized book format (whether older material or current), even when those books are available in the mass market. Some super-hero books have become evergreen sellers in the mass market and have enjoyed good and steady sales for years. They tend to be standalone stories (Watchmen, Dark Knight, Batman Year One) or series with a distinct beginning, middle and END (Sandman, Preacher) or working towards a distinct end (Saga, Walking Dead) rather than never-ending stories of any type no matter how formatted, packaged, numbered or sold.

Looking at numbering in the face of all the other barriers and market forces working against the way direct market publishers try to sell their products to customers that have to be solved before numbering even becomes a barrier to sales is quite frankly unproductive. The problem is that for the types of changes to be made that will solve some of the issues requires an infrastructure that the direct market doesn't provide and and doesn't currently exist, and neither Disney nor Warner wants to make the kind of capital investment needed to create such an infrastructure (mostly likely because they don't see enough future revenue resulting form print sales and Disney at least sees an out of licensing material out to other publishers and focusing on being a content creator rather than a publisher). I mean if Disney were serious about making a dent into the mass market with their Marvel books-why aren't Marvel Comics available for sale in Disney stores or the gift/souvenir shops at their resorts and hotels?-other Marvel products are, including kids and young reader prose books but not actual Marvel Comics or trades).

So number them any way you want, it won't make a damn bit of difference to sales long term unless you solve all the other problems that act as barriers to sales and attracting new readers.

-M