I find tonnes of them do. I may just be listening with rose coloured nostalgia ear-buds...

This company has some really cool titles

See I was annoyed by this. I have had enough with shared universes and people trying to link everything together rather than just focusing on telling good stories with the characters they have. It's lazy marketing and if it is too intrusive I may well drop Micronauts and Rom which are 2 of the 3 books on my pull list.

My standard reaction whenever a publisher tries to make me choose all or nothing with some event or publishing incentive is to choose nothing. Put out good books, I'll choose which ones I want to buy, if you can't let me choose what I like and take that business, you'll get no business from me. Your products are a luxury, not a necessity and I don't have to buy them, so stop trying to make me feel like I need to buy product I don't want-make me want the product instead by doing good stories and good art within the book not attaching bells and whistles I don't care about instead.

-M

And surprise, surprise...DC has already announced their first Rebirth crossover and we're only a month into this damn thing.

I was assuming they would at least give it 6-8 months before they pulled this, allowing most of the major books to have at least 1 or 2 story arcs before diving in.

Silly me

I haven't been able to quite figure out why I've never been interested (even as a kid) in any of these old licensed Marvel comics characters. I loved Transformer's and G.I. Joe as toys and cartoons (same for MASK) but I never had any interest in the comics. I suppose it could be that I was obsessed with the concept of the Marvel universe as a kid and teenager and poured over those old Official Handbooks. When I learned that ROM, G.I. Joe and Transformers weren't official parts of the Marvel universe, I suppose I formed some kind of weird mental block to their comics.

I've heard that the original Larry Hamma run on G.I. Joe was a great 80's run, so I might need to reevaluate my stance and at least try that one.

My entertainment budget is set. I've set aside $8 a month for the stories I want to read in Rom and Micronauts. Paying more for that is not worth the entertainment I am getting form them. An incomplete story is not entertaining, so the extra parts are not in my budget, and the incomplete story is not worth spending part of my budget on, so that's why not.

I can use the the $8 for something that will entertain me, not leave me frustrated with a partial story, and I am not going to take money from elsewhere in the budget to buy books I have no interest in otherwise (G.I. Joe, Transformers, the core mini, etc.) to get the compete story and pass on other things I have already budgeted for. It's simple, if greed drives you to try to take more of the money in my discretionary budget than I am willing to give you, I will simply stop giving you part of my discretionary budget altogether. If you are providing a necessity, I rearrange my budge to accommodate additional expenses because I need to, if you are providing a luxury, I rearrange what I purchase to accommodate my budget because luxury is a choice and by trying to take too much you make not getting any the desired option.

I understand why they do it, but they have to understand these types of short term cash grabs may well cost them part of their long term customer base, and in an industry with such a thin line between a book being a viable product and being unprofitable, long term viability is at risk with these stunts. The hop eis always someone buying the books they don't usually get because of a cross-over will become regular purchasers because of the exposure, but more often than not, the purchases are short term and don't continue beyond the cross-over and some purchasers (like me) who don't buy in at all, won't return after the cross-over, so the losses will negate or outweigh any potential gains and any sales increase will be a short term spike followed by a long term decline because natural attrition will already put the book in decline mode as par for the course, and dissatisfaction with cross-overs only speeds up the attrition rate.

It is again, publishers relying on the completist mentality of collectors to try to sell products at the expense of the buying proclivities of more casual readers, and the completist sector of the market is too small to be viable as a mainstream product and limiting the long-term growth and viability of your product as anything other than an over-priced niche product. If they are content to milk that completist hardcore core for whatever they can get in the short term without any hope of actually growing their business, this is a great strategy. If they actually want to grow their business beyond a short term niche product, not so much. So there are lots of reasons why not.

-M