Since you are apparently WILLFULLY illiterate, let me repeat: My newspaper is extremely hyper-local. It only covers TWO small towns in our area. And its per-issue sales are STILL competitive with comics that are sold NATIONWIDE.

Prior to “Ends of the Earth,” almost as many people in ONLY THOSE TWO TOWNS were buying as many copies of my newspaper as were buying copies of Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES.

Hopefully, your math skills are slightly better than your totally nonexistent reading ability.

Look on the bright side: When your paper tanks in a couple of years and you’re out of a job you’ll have plenty of time to sit at home making graphs about how poorly all the comic books you pirate are selling.

Actually, my local small-town weekly newspaper is selling about as many copies per issue as the bottom half of Marvel’s sales list. Thanks for asking, though.

LOL! Wanna hear something funny? Gues what K-Box does for a living? He writes for a newpaper! HAHAHAHAHA! How’re those newspaper sales doin’ buddy?

Surely a preview is put out there to give people a taster of the whole. So if they aren’t finding the taster exciting or interesting then are they really going to enjoy the full issue?

Would they be complaining about judging on the preview if all the comments were positive?

Given that modern Marvel is selling in numbers that got Bob Harras fired as EiC a decade ago, I’d say a lot of people have already taken this advice.

It’s funny, because the example Brevoort’s pointing out is (a)pretty egregious and (b)easy to explain away. The reason other comics haven’t shown the X-Men and the Phoenix Five hunting down the Avengers is because they take place BEFORE the final scene in AvX #6, just like Brevoort. Pretty simple.

Also, back in my early days of reading comics, I didn’t need hand holding like restarting comics at issue 1 over and over again or changing costumes to match movies. I would pick up a good book, regarding of the issue number and “figure it out for myself.”

The blind leading the blind

Nail on the head, Marc-Oliver Frisch. Nail on the head.

I think it’s a matter of readers having been burned too many times.

This was less of a problem when I started reading comics mostly because I started reading Marvel Comics under Jim Shooter, who was pretty rigid in what he required from the stories.

And as much as the internet might hurt the general reputation of fans, the same can be said of editors. Fair or not, the level of trust that used to be there just isn’t anymore.

Y-E-S.

–J.

There’s an interesting discussion in there somewhere about how Marvel and DC readers no longer trust those creators enough to figure that questions in the story are raised consciously, rather than the result of negligent storytelling.

If the audience had the carefully cultivated confidence in these types of stories that everything, in the end, will make sense and come to a satisfying conclusion that rewards you for working your way past the uncertainties, I imagine fewer people would be complaining to Tom Brevoort.

I think part of it is due to storytelling changes as well — in the days of ubiquitous editors’ notes and heavy exposition, some of this stuff really was more explicit (if hamfisted). I recall an issue of Secret Wars where they had to stop and explain why Professor X had appeared on the planet in a wheelchair he no longer needed, and why Cyclops was back with the team again, etc.

Personally, I’m kind of glad when they don’t take up story pages with that kind of bookkeeping. But to be fair, they could have waited to release last week’s Wolverine & the X-Men issue until after AvX #7, if would make more sense that way.