Am I the only one callin' Bullshit on Marvel for putting out "Special" Milestone issues after having renumbered a book the year before?!

Latest example of this, Wolverine #300.

They ReStart with a #1, but somebody somewhere is keeping track of the ACTUAL issue count.

ugh...

But there I am, everytime, buying the damn thing...

I feel you. I think it's pretty stupid too.

But I don't buy them. I think it'd be cool if they could re-start the numbering and then have a milestone # for the NEW numbering, like at 50 or 100.

I don't blame Marvel.

Every time Marvel and DC reboot a series with a new first issue, thousands of morons run to the comics shops and buy one or more copies. After all, IT'S A FIRST ISSUE! It's gonna be WORTH A MILLION BUCKS ONE DAY! A-dur! EVERYONE knows that!

Then, with the second issue, those speculators all disappear -- sitting on their wallets until the next first issue a year or two later.

The only bumps most comics series get these days is with the rebooted first issues.

Check out these Marvel sales figures:

UNCANNY X-MEN
07/11 #541 - 55,856 ( -2.4%)
08/11 #542 - 54,840 ( -1.8%)
09/11 #543 - 58,326 ( +6.4%)
10/11 #544 - 60,212 ( +3.2%)
11/11 #1 - 109,911 (+82.5%)
11/11 #2 - 72,485 (-34.1%)

INCREDIBLE HULK
07/11 #633 - 27,216 ( -4.6%)
08/11 #634 - 27,310 ( +0.3%)
08/11 #635 - 38,223 ( +40.0%)
09/11 ---
10/11 #1 - 106,472 (+178.6%)
11/11 #2 - 80,143 ( -24.7%)

CAPTAIN AMERICA
03/11 #616 - 44,394 ( +3.0%)
04/11 #617 - 45,400 ( +2.3%)
05/11 #618 - 44,748 ( -1.4%)
06/11 #619 - 44,796 ( +0.1%)
07/11 #1 - 96,926 (+116.4%)
08/11 #2 - 54,384 ( -43.9%)

Looking at these numbers, it's not Marvel who should feel like an idiot for the constant renumbering. It's the dimwits who buy comics because of the number on the cover rather than the content.

It can be a good point to get into a character too. I don't want to start reading Super-Face at issue #439 but if they're doing a relaunch and I like the character maybe a new first issue is a good place to get involved.

On the titles Lawson listed above each one still has an increased readership of at least 10,000 people by issue #2. That tells me at least a fifth (or so) of the extra readers stayed on board because they want to read about Super-Face. That's still an overwhelming amount of people who picked it up as a million dollar investment, but it's a definite, and successful factor.

That said, as one of the 44,000 people already reading Super-Face I now have no choice but to sit through another retelling of his origin...or it's a perfect opportunity to jump off and move on to something else, or nothing else. Either way Super-Face made a few thousand more bucks, so regardless of whether I stay, leave or get upset while doing one or the other the publisher sure aren't going to care what I do.

As a boy in the 1970s, I started reading plenty of superhero comics that had been published for decades. Most of them were numbered in the 200s, 300s or 400s.

They didn't reboot every 18 months to create a fresh "jumping on point."

They were simply accessible. The stories tended to be stand-alone tales or maybe two-parters -- the titles usually were contained within themselves -- and everything you needed to know about the characters were explained in the little box at the top of the splash page.

Yeah, it all seems so unnecessarily complicated. You didn't even need to know the origins to enjoy the story, but I still remember getting excited when Stan Lee published Origins and Son of Origins.

And remember reprint books? We never got confused about continuity even with the various reprints, all on the comic racks together with current continuity or even in the same comic.

Marvel would reprint Avengers Spiderman and the FF in books like Marvel Triple Action, Marvel Tales, and Marvels Greatest, DC would put reprints in the back of their 100 page giants, and both companies would publish those giant tabloids, those were great comics. Totally out of context, single issue stories for the most part.

I agree, it is wildly over complicated. But, for better or worse, it's not the 1970's anymore. I wish the Big Two would tell stories that could speak for themselves. I'd love to pick up vol.12 of Super-Face and not have to read the previous 11 collections, doing it that way might even make them more money. As it stands, with the current system of having to read 409 issues of Super-Face plus the other 700 tie-in issues to even begin to understand what's happening, relaunching isn't the worst thing they can do.

It's by no means a perfect system, or even a good system, but relaunches definitely have their place in today's market.

A few years ago, I broke the weekly comics habit. I canceled my pull list and stopped going to the comics shop every Wednesday. I might visit a comics shop once every two months.

It's now next to impossible for me to return to anything published at DC or Marvel. I've read a few floppies since I quit the weekly habit. Unfortunately, the companywide sagas have gotten even more complicated and interconnected. You can't read this week's SUPERMAN unless you read last month's GREEN LANTERN which was based on BLACKEST NIGHT which followed the events of INFINITE CRISIS.

There should be some kind of meetings, for comics guys who quit the weekly habit, y'know with donuts and with sponsors. Maybe we could watch old Superman episodes or swap back issues after the meetings.

When I started lurking at comics message boards, a decade ago, most of the people I knew hit the comics shop every Wednesday. The biggest threads were the "What did you get this week?" threads.

Now, most of the fanboys I know online (and occasionally see in real life) have broken the weekly habit. They still hit the store or a convention sometimes to raid the 50-cent boxes. They order some trades from Amazon, especially reprints of the classic old stuff. But they don't know and don't care what's happening to Spider-Man or Superman this week.

As I track the continued decline in comics sales numbers, I can personally vouch for a couple of dozen customers who have disappeared from the radar.