Posted in: Comics | Tagged: make mine marvel, marvel

The Bleeding Cool Reader's Guide To Understanding Marvel's Legacy Numbers

Published Fri, 03 Mar 2017 14:00:16 -0600

With the recently revealed news that Marvel is planning to relaunch many of its books as part of a "meat and potatoes" initiative this Fall titled "Make Mine Marvel" that will see comics return to their original legacy numbering, we here at Bleeding Cool realize that many readers will probably find this news confusing and scary. What are these big numbers, and what do they mean? Where do you start reading a book if it doesn't have a new #1 issue ever twelve to eighteen months? Fear not, true believer! The boisterous Bleeding Cool bullpen has put together a gregarious guide to answer some of your most important questions and ensure that this transition goes as smoothly as possible!

Me so stoopid. Me no understand big numbers. What big numbers mean?

Great question, reader! This is one of the first things readers are likely to ask themselves when encountering a comic with legacy numbering. Marvel readers aren't used to seeing books with numbers higher than the low double digits, because literally minutes of marketing research done by some of the brightest minds in the world of comic book executives have informed the company for years that people need a new number one issue to know that it's okay to start reading a comic. Large numbers are intimidating to new readers, who naturally assume that they must have read the previous 516 issues of a comic in order to pick up issue #517. That's why Marvel was unable to gain any new readers at all in the period from 1961 to 2012, when Marvel's original Marvel NOW! relaunch began the "seasonal" model of yearly relaunches.

Literally no other time in comic book history was better for Marvel than right now. Sure, nowadays, most books are lucky to have 30,000 readers, when even the lowest selling books back in the day had readership numbering in the hundreds of thousands, but that's the whole point! Big numbers bad. Small numbers good. Can you imagine how daunting it was for a Marvel accountant to tally all those sales numbers back when comics were more than a slowly dying niche market? It was probably a lot of work, and nobody likes work, especially not people in the comics business. If they did, they would have gotten real jobs like their mothers told them to!

Marvel seems to have forgotten this golden rule and is bringing back those incomprehensibly high numbers, but, on the bright side, sales are unlikely to ever return to those historical highs, at least until a comic book publisher makes a serious effort to market outside of the existing niche readership, which would, again, be way too much work. As for you, dear reader, if you remain calm and remember that the 900th issue of a book is just like the first issue of a book that has been rebooted 75 times, everything will turn out okay. Trust us.

How do I know where to start reading a comic without a new #1 issue?

It's true, without a new #1 issue, it's going to be extremely difficult to tell when to jump onto a series. Can you believe that, back in the dark ages, comic book creators used to have to assume that every issue of a comic could be somebody's first, and write accordingly? That must have been a real pain in the butt. If you're spending all your time making every comic new-reader friendly, where would you ever find the time to post dozens of times a day to social media about politics or vanity search and berate fans who criticize your work on Twitter? Clearly, making every issue new-reader friendly is a non-starter, so how will Marvel readers find new entry points?

Well, for the answer to this question, we have to look at the history of the numbering system and how it came to be. It's actually a misconception that renumbering series makes it easier to collect comics. The whole point of introducing consecutive whole numbers to replace the older date or volume method of numbering periodicals was to promote collectibility, making it much easier to see if you missed any issues so you could go and collect them. That's why, in a lot of older comics, you'll find notes from the editor telling you what issue something relevant to the current storyline happened in so you could go and read it if you want to know more. Of course, Marvel editors today don't have time for that sort of thing, as they have more important responsibilities, such as appearing in fluff interviews on comic book websites or practicing their ukulele skills.

Still, there's a really simple solution to this problem that doesn't require any notes from an editor or creators caring about new readers. All you have to do is buy every previous issue of a comic ever published and read them, and you'll be all caught up and ready to go.

How can Marvel reconcile continuity in a book with hundreds of issues? Isn't that hard?

How can Marvel reconcile continuity in a book with hundreds of issues? The answer is simple: they won't. Yes, it's historically difficult to manage an ongoing story that spans several decades. That's why Marvel stopped trying sometime in the 1980s. Nowadays, Marvel comics are "character driven," a phrase which means characterization is placed in a car and driven off a steep cliff. Instead of trying to keep things consistent, Marvel changes their characters' personalities around to suit whatever story their superstar writers feel like telling at any given time. Sure, Hawkeye used to be so anti-killing that he divorced his wife after she allowed her rapist to fall off a cliff to his death in an actual comic book story we're not making up. Today, Hawkeye is a bloodthirsty killing machine who will shoot an arrow through Bruce Banner's eye just because he might possibly turn into the Hulk again, Reed Richards is perfectly willing to create a murderous clone of Thor to support a fascist desire to register all superheroes with the government, and Captain America, who got his start punching Hitler in the face, is now a Nazi and actually always has been. See? That's so much easier to understand!

One way to measure shifts in Marvel continuity is to look at which failed American war a character's origin is steeped in. Did you know that, when Iron Man first debuted in 1963, his origin took place during the Vietnam War? In the 1990s, Iron Man's origin was updated to first Gulf War, and later, the war in Afghanistan. Where will Iron Man's origin take place next? We'll have to wait and see where President Donald Trump decides to start America's next endless, unwinnable conflict that only serves to destabilize the region it takes place in and lead to decades of future problems for the entire planet. Then Marvel can just stick Iron Man's origin there, and the fact that Marvel's characters never seem to age or grow over the decades will make sense again! Thanks President Trump!

Aren't comics only valuable if they're #1 issues?

Back in the 1990s, there was an industry boom because everyone thought that new number one issues, if put in a plastic back and stored in a basement for twenty years or so, would increase so much in value that they could "put your kids through college" or serve as a retirement nest egg. As it turns out, this was completely false, and the resulting crash nearly killed the American comic book industry as we know it, a traumatic experience that left such an imprint on the industry that we're now repeating all the same mistakes it made back then, such as catering to speculators with endless variant cover gimmicks or spiking sales with super-mega-crossover events that force readers to pick up books they normally don't read rather than actually make those books so good that people want to read them naturally or marketing them to a wide audience.

The truth is, the reason comics from the Golden Age and Silver were so valuable wasn't because they were #1 issues, but because most parents disposed of their children's comic book collections as soon as their kids were old enough to leave the house. Ask anyone above the age of 50, and it's a near guarantee that they will tell you about all the great classic comics that would be worth a million dollars today they used to have before their mom threw them in the garbage in 1975. Of course, we're speaking figuratively here, and you should never ask anyone over 50 anything, as they will probably never shut up about their stupid life experiences and historical knowledge. No one cares about the war, Grandpa! This is why we have to put you in a home!

The point is that scarcity is what makes comics valuable, not the comic's number, or its holographic foil variant cover inside a sealed polybag with a limited edition trading card. So you shouldn't be looking to #1 issues if you want your comics to be valuable in 20 years. What you should be doing is looking to destroy the comic book collections of all your fellow collectors by any means necessary so that you have some of the few remaining copies of these books left. Then, you play the waiting game.

When will we go back to yearly #1 issue relaunches again?

Probably sometime in 2018, when Marvel relaunches everything again.

We hope you found this guide to Marvel's legacy numbering helpful in your quest to understand Marvel's upcoming relaunch. If you have any other questions about Marvel's legacy numbering, post them in the comments, and we will do our best to completely ignore them.

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