With Rich Johnston reporting that all of DC’s DCU books will be renumbered from #1 in September, Marvel’s Tom Brevoort on relaunching (and renumbering) series:
Hopefully we don’t relaunch things too willy-nilly. Depending on the reader, they may argue that we do. And there’s the argument out there that we never should have relaunched anything and the number the books are on now should be what we would have been on had we never done any of it and that would have been a better world. I don’t even necessarily argue with that. The place where I do argue is “Yes, but Heroes Reborn did happen, and at this point all bets are off.” You can’t just go back and pretend like nothing had happened. Something did happen, and that set the stage for a lot of the renumbering and relaunching that we still do today. At some point, 40 years of unbroken publication of all these titles was broken, and once that’s broken, you can pretend it’s still all there, but it’s never quite going to be seamless again. Combine that with the fact that our marketplace is more welcoming to a #1 than a #183, and it means that if you’re going to do something big, attention-getting and outreach-based, a #1 is only going to help you. Even the most casual potential comic book reader understands that a #1 is the beginning and that a #1 is the comic you save for your kids’ college fund. That’s important when you’re trying to get people into the stores.
The fact of the matter is that renumber is inviting to people even in terms of the dyed-in-the-wool fan. It says, “Here’s something important that’s going on. Here’s the beginning. Here’s absolutely the easiest way in that you could possibly get.” And hopefully the content reflects that and is accessible enough and engaging enough that somebody picks up that first issue and says, “I like this. Let me read more.” But it’s just the fact of life at this point.
After it was pointed out that Uncanny X-Men is the only long-running title at Marvel that hasn’t been renumbered at some point and asked whether that made it “safe” from a renumber/relaunch:
I would not assume that it’s safe. Maybe that makes it a little less likely because it’s the one title we’ve got that maintains continuity all the way back to the ’60s. But again, in terms of publishing today in 2011, 2012, 2013 — the need of right now is probably going to outweigh the need of “it’s nice that we have this thing that goes back to the ’60s.” If there’s a benefit to there being an “Uncanny X-Men” #1 because we’re building something in a substantial way and we want to give people that entry point, maybe we’d hesitate a fraction of a second longer, but I think it’d be only a fraction. If the plan still makes sense in our marketplace today, I suspect we’d go ahead and do it and wouldn’t blink at the fact that this is the one title we’ve got that goes all the way back to the ’60s with an unbroken string of numbers. That’s just my sense of it.
This is very much where common sense and my sense of fanboyishness come to blows. Brevoort’s entirely right that publishers should do whatever’s necessary to bring in new readers, and especially to demonstrate to potential new readers when there’s a good place to start, and, yes: Saying “this is the first issue” is really the best way to do that. But… I hate relaunches and renumbering. I find the idea, for example, of DC going from #904 to #1 of Action Comics to be weirdly disrespectful to the history of the comic, for some reason. I find the renumbering of, say, Ultimate Spider-Man from #16 to #150 and then being relaunched a year later to be a cynical exploitation of fans. I wish that there was some way to denote a new jumping on point – Remember those “This Is It! The Start Of A New Era!”-style banners that used to appear on covers? – that would do away with the need to renumber, but this really might be one of those cases where reality just isn’t on my side.
Is there something that could work as an alternative, though? What kind of thing would express a good place for new readers to start, if not a new #1 – and do you think you’d fall for it?
May 31st, 2011 at 11:44 am
Why have numbers? Just use the date, or at least the month. Do magazines have numbers? Newspapers? TV shows? (OK, they do but for internal usage mainly.) No more numbers!!!
May 31st, 2011 at 11:45 am
How about if each issue had numbering reflecting an arc (or direction) but inside the real issue number remained. Just in the indica – that way the issue number continues and can be used to highlight big anniversaries, but can be ignored as much as the company wants the rest of the time. And that removes the confusing volume numbers from the equation.
Does BPRD do this now? They might.
May 31st, 2011 at 11:49 am
Last year I would have scoffed at a total re-numbering off all books. However, as I’ve backslidden from comics in the last three or four months, the prospect of all new 1′s has me interested in picking up books I normally wouldn’t have touched before. Of course, the catch would be that I would want an actual ‘first issue’ for each book (i.e., character intros, story set up, and title purpose). I would be disappointed to pick up a #1 comic and find no real series establishment.
May 31st, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Part of the problem is that so many series have already been renumbered so many times that renumbering itself has become a point of potential confusion for new readers.
Let’s say you renumber all of Marvel’s titles with new number ones. If a new reader says, “I want the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man,” and he or she goes online or goes to a bookstore, they’re going to find trade paperbacks and hardcovers that already promote themselves as including the “first” issue of Amazing Spider-Man, both the Lee-and-Ditko one AND the Byrne-and-Mackie one.
Also, unless you completely reboot continuity and start from scratch, your new number one is still going to tie back into stories that were told before that point, which will leave new readers confused when they realize that they still need to read previous issues to fully understand what’s going on in a supposedly ground-floor issue.
May 31st, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Instead of numbers we switch to a high-pitched sonic system, that only trained dogs can hear.
“What’s that boy? There’s a new issue of Jimmy Olsen?”
“… down a well? AGAIN?!”
May 31st, 2011 at 5:43 pm
The problem I have with Marvel’s renumbering is that it always seems so arbitrary and willy nilly. I could live with the Heroes Reborn restart, or when DC restarted books like Wonder Woman in the 80s because there really were significantly new directions there. The characters in FF #416 and WW #329 weren’t the same as the ones in the new series. Nowadays they’ll do it whenever. FF #1 is basically the second half of Hickman’s Fantastic Four run, continuing the various plotlines he set up there. And a lot of Marvel’s restarts have the same writers (and sometimes the same artists) simply continuing what they had already been doing. How is that supposed to be a “ground floor” for new readers?
May 31st, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Renumber all of the x-titles now. Part of a new Marvel Initiative ™. X.1 or something. Use Comic Book Resources X-Books forum for feedback. It is the only you SHOULDN’T do things.
May 31st, 2011 at 8:10 pm
The Superman titles used to have an S-shield with a number denoting where each issue fell within a particular story arc, along with the standard number. I always thought that was an excellent idea. I hate the idea of a company-wide “relaunch.”