Yes, it can be annoying. We're about to get the 3rd Superman #1 of the past 7 years. This month saw the fifth variation of Thor #1 that Jason Aaron has scripted in the past few years (which is not nearly as annoying as the fact hat the same goddamn storyline is still going on, and the "Malekith takes on the Ten Worlds war" plot will seemingly last through the next 5 Thor #1's...).
But what's hard to take is the "oh, think of the children" laments we get from some quarters, bemoaning that it's impossible to direct people to the correct comics now.
Please. That's why we have volume numbers and dates. It's not as if librarians are put out because each issue of Time or The Economist or Sports Illustrated doesn't have a specific issue number, or that each Spenser novel doesn't have the correct reading order printed on the spine, and the world goes sailing on happily.
It's also the case that many of us grew up in an impressive golden age of stability, of little if any renumbering, that was really an anomaly of comics history. Whether to play fast and loose with postal regulations or to trick newsstand owners into keeping their books displayed, comic book numbering has been more of an art than a science for as long as they've existed.
Let's take a look at a Fox title, for example, in the height of the Golden Age. 1945 saw the debut of Krazy Life #1:
Apparently neither Krazy nor Nutty satisfied Fox, as issue #3 was suddenly:
Wotalife lasted from #3-#12, until with #13, the title suddenly transmogrified into:
Well, we had stability for 11 whole issues, until suddenly, with #24, as Phantom Lady was gone, and...
My Secret Love lasted from #24 through #30, until...
31 issues over 6 years with 6 different titles and three different genres. And that history is not particularly convoluted compared to other books of the day.
So, yeah, Marvel should stop it with the damn renumberings/relaunches. It is annoying as all get-out. But it's not as if it's anything new or transgressive. It's the way the industry has always been! And somehow we'll muddle through.
I wonder did they have subscriptions back then? If you signed up for a year of Wotalife funny animal cartoons how did you feel when you started getting Phantom Lady good-girl art hero comics instead?
ReplyDeleteIn his introduction to All Star Archives #11, Roy Thomas tells the story of having scraped together the $1 needed to subscribe to the title. There was no way for him to know that his first issue, All Star #57, would be the *last*, followed (fulfilling the remaining two years of his subscription) by All Star Western #58 containing no sign that the book had ever featured his beloved Justice Society.
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say, *some* publishers had subscriptions, and yes, transitioning to the follow-up title is exactly how it would have been handled.
When All-Star was revived in late 1975, the new issue #58 had a letter page with two letters. One was from Roy Thomas and the other from his fanzine collaborator Jerry Bails. The Thomas letter was a "complaint" about the switch to All-Star Western and a request that DC resume his subscription by sending the next eleven issues of All-Start.
ReplyDeleteI was pretty young at the time, and did not know Roy Thomas by name or his connection to Marvel, so I was puzzled by the editor's response that he was familiar with Thomas from his fanzine work, but that Thomas "disappeared from fan circles and hasn't been heard from since."
I took a (bad) photo of the letter page, and will send it to Snell in case he want to share it.