^ Exactly. Well said.

One thing that getting everything in collections shows you is how useless these crossovers are. By the time I end up reading them, the ramifications are all retconned anyway. I was pretty much rolling my eyes through both Forever Evil and Original Sin.

I'm putting in my preorders in DCBS, and I think I'll actually get the convergence issues dealing with the pre-52 verse, if only in a futile way of trying to show them I still care about that universe.

Not sure about Original Sin, but Forever Evil most definitely has not been retconned (yet).

Took them long enough to knock off calling it The New 52, no longer new or 52.

Now for all comics to STOP adding the word NEW to their comic titles. Its not a new breakfast cereal and its a very boring generic title. Everything is All New, sounds like an advertisement.

But that's exactly what it is. The titles are advertisements and a form of branding rather than creatively titled as works of literature or art. It's just the way she goes these days.

At least with Marvel and DC. A few other companies are a bit better about it. Marvel has gotten really bad and both DC and Marvel have killed the numbering system so bad it took take someone a month to get everything in order. They just keep restarting a series with the same name basically back to back.

There are entertaining stories there yet it does feel a bit cheap with how they market their comics.

I guess it works on someone. I personally find it a bit off putting and annoying then anything that would get my attention. (If it is good it is good and I will take a look)

You must hate Nintendo, then...

What is worse is when they go back to old numbering and the in between issues are counted towards the new number. So you have Fantastic Four 687 and Fantastic Four 712. Would drive me insane with that gap and no issues numbered 688-713.

They just announced Uncanny X-Men #600 in May. The issue before that one is #35.

:facepalm:

I hate the constant renumbering, but it doesn't bother me as much now that I have gone completely to trade waiting.

You know that Action Comics is going to revert to its original numbering when it hits issue #1,000 too. It will be the first ever comic book series to hit 1,000 issues, so there is absolutely no way that DC doesn't milk it as much as possible.

Let's see now. Action Comics volume 1 was at 904 issues before the New 52 relaunch. Action Comics volume 2 is up to 39 issues. So that's 943 total issues. So in a little more than 4 and half years, it will hit #1,000. (That is also assuming no pauses in publication like for events like Zero Month, Villains Month, Convergence Month, etc. so it will actually be closer to 5 years probably.)

Or maybe it'll go weekly again.

I actually really wanted that concept to work. I love the idea of an anthology comic.

That's not a bad idea. DC has two weeklies now with Batman Eternal and World's End. World's End is ending with Convergence. Maybe they could replace it by making Action Comics weekly for one year. It's at 943 issues right now so if they wait until 948 and then make it weekly for one year, then it would hit #1000 right at the end of that one year period.

In non-DC/Marvel news - Archie Comics just announced that they are canceling Archie with #666 and rebooting with a whole new #1 starting sometime in the summer. We just lost another long running title.

In July, IDW will re-re-re-re-release Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and retain it's original numbering (#721). The book started in 1940 and had been released through a ton of different publishers but still managed to maintain it's numbering. The next runner up is Sonic The Hedgehog with #269.

Also speaking of IDW, the latest solicitations make it seem like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #50 will be the last issue. The editor of the book posts on the IDW forums, and he clarified that it isn't actually ending, but rather most likely it is just getting relaunched with a new #1. :facepalm: So even the small companies are getting into this relaunch with a new #1 craze.

Jughead dabbling in the dark arts again? What a number to end on.

He never learns.

They do it because it works. Whether people think it makes it easier to jump into a book or it increases the collectibility (like it's 1992) or what, I don't know. But it works and is profitable.

As someone who only buys trades, it doesn't matter much to me. I'm more concerned about the reviews the collected material gets overall in addition to having interest in the creative teams involved. #1-6 or #163-169, it doesn't really matter to me.

The only time it becomes sort of a problem is when the number reboot comes so rapidly after another reboot and you haven't necessarily been following the publication history. Like Captain Marvel's recent reboot resulted in Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: In Pursuit of Flight coming out late 2012/early 2013 (followed by a Vol. 2 and an Avengers trade that's really a Captain Marvel trade) and Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More is October 2014 (with Vol. 2 coming out soon). Without seeing the publication dates, you might not necessarily know what one comes first, ESPECIALLY since the writer is the same and there hasn't been anything drastic done to the character that would make it easy to differentiate the trades.

Comparatively, you're not going to mix up Reed's Danvers Ms. Marvel series with Wilson's Khan Ms. Marvel.

Post #43? Ok... someone alert a moderator to reboot this thread.

Post #45 should become Post #500 first. Then reboot.

And what make it even worse is that FF was suppose to count yet it continued to go on thus it was always its own series that was not Fantastic Four. The numbering system is such a mess there is no way to fix anything from the past. If someone is looking for Avengers issue eight they will have to ask, which one, there are two dozen.

I was working on something last year where I was figuring this all out, it is such a complete joke with no logic or reasoning behind it. At least puta date, volume number if you want to reboot it every six months. At least some compaines do that. Marvel will just say, New Avengers (what a sarcastically great title there) and if you look back in a few year good luck trying to figure out what goes to what because there will be eight series within a decade with the same name.

What would really help if they just put the month & year on the cover. They used to put at least the month on the covers. I always noticed the month was always 2-3 months away when it actually came out. Putting the month/year would help since you can at least look for the #8 that came out in 2015 and ignore the #8 from 2017.

I really, really despise all the renumbering done by Marvel and DC. I think both companies realized the high numbers were free advertising for older back issues, which they don't get a cut in sales. One of the first reasons why I started buying back issues many years ago was to see earlier issues of the monthlies I was currently reading.

I think the problem with this is that as scheduled inevitably slip, you're going to end up with some December issues coming out in January, February or later. Then do you double up those months, with "seasons" of Spider-Man overlapping, or do you skip those missed months and have a book that is seemingly missing its Jan-Feb issues the way re numbered runs are seemingly missing certain issues?

The idea that there was this huge sprawling backstory to these characters (X-Men in particular) is actually what drew me to comics when I was a kid. My friend and I would spend hours speculating about bits and pieces that we had heard/read about. Sometimes we would get our hands on an older back issue that filled in some tiny piece of the puzzle and it would kickstart the conversation for days. Of course, there was no internet, so none of this stuff could be looked up at a moments notice. Of course the sad reality often was and is, we built up in our head the key moments that we had only heard about to a point that the actual stories rarely delivered when we finally read them.

Cover date has never been publication date for periodicals released on the newsstands. Even for magazines like Time and National Geographic the cover date is always deliberately a month or two ahead of the actual publication date.

There are two reasons for this.

One reason is that back in the days of newsstands, the cover date would be equivalent to the pull date. Magazines, comics, etc would have a pull date to let the seller know when to pull unsold copies off the newsstand and return them to the publisher.

The second reason is that putting a cover date ahead of publication date makes it seem more "current" to buyers when they see it on the newsstand after it has already been sitting there unsold for a month or two.

Anyway, I always liked how the Superman comics did numbering during the "triangle era" of the 90s. There were four monthly Superman comics back then with one released every week (and a quarterly title released on the months with five weeks). Action Comics kept it's original numbering, so you would see something like #625 on the cover. In addition, there would be triangle with the week and year in it. So for example, the comic released the first week of 1992 would have a triangle number of 1-1992. The comic released the second week would be 2-1992. The comic on the last week of December would therefore be 52-1992. Then the next week it would renumber back to 1 with 1-1993. That numbering method kept both the original numbering and a "new #1 relaunch" every year. I wish more comics would have adopted such a method.

Here's an example of the "triangle era" numbering:

You can see the original numbering (Action Comics #684) as well as the triangle number of 48-1992.