I agree. With all the renumbering it dissuades new readers from going back & getting into a series. The mindset is "jumping on" points...for me it has become "jumping off" points. New readers don't seem to want to go back & read past issues. And if they try it has gotten too complicated. Even trades make no sense in their numbering...

Back in the days before comics were being collected on any sort of grand scale, there was sometimes a perceived stigma to #1 issues. The thinking seems to have been that readers would be more inclined to purchase an established title than something new and untried.

As incomprehensible as this may be in a modern market, consider that the debuts of powerhouse titles like Journey into Mystery and Tales to Astonish (among many others of the time) made no mention of the issue number on the cover.

1) Publishers don't care about back issue sales at all, let alone how easy or difficult it is for someone to search them out, they make zero money form it so why should they.

2) When comic customers (retailers and fans) stop buying #1 issues in significantly higher numbers than other issue numbers making them vastly more profitable for publishers than continuing the numbering on series, then they will stop making new #1s.

Until such a time, you get the comics the buying habits of fandom deserve. All the complaining in the world doesn't matter when a new Harley Quinn #1 can sell 400K copies but issue 12 would have only sold 40K. Publishers don't answer to fans, they answer to stockholders and what sell and makes stockholders happy is what they will publish.

-M

Thanks. This made me laugh. Wonder what sold better - "All-Dry Cleaned Captain Tight Pants" or "Starch Free Captain Tight Pants"?

They really don't care. Their owners just want you to see the movie.

Back issue sales don't show up on quarterly reports. If quarterly reports look bad, people lose jobs and reboots happen to spike sales. Long term planning doesn't exist in an industry (print) that most "experts" think will disappear in less than a score of years. You make what money you can in the short term until there is no longer any money to be made. Readership plummeted long before reboots and renumbering were he norm. Looking at the data, renumbering has caused growth, however small, staying the course with numbering showed long term attrition and zero growth. Nobody starts on back issues and comes to new comics unless it is via trades these days, so making back issues easier to find is not planning for long term growth, it is watching sales go to someone else unless you can get a piece of the sales via trades and omnibi.

Publishers are not in the secondary collector market, they are in the primary sales department, and there is no hard sales evidence that nurturing the back issue market leads to long term growth in the primary market. I don't think book publishers look at what's selling in used bookstores to see where they should look for long term growth or look to ease sales of out of print books to help lead people to buy books in print. Nor movie/tv studios look to what's selling in second hand video/dvd stores to see what they should look to to increase sales for their current product. There's just no justifiable correlation between secondary sale sand new sales for it to matter.

Maybe 20-30 year ago when not everything was available digitally or via trade there might have been some correlation, but it's 3 decades later and the current customer base for new comics has little to no interest in comics from vintage eras or care a whit about "legacy numbering" and ease of back issue purchases. Look at sales of non-evergreen vintage material in trade vs. sales of new releases in collected editions to give you an indication of potential sales in the back issue market. Most series of collected vintage runs have trouble getting past one or two volumes unless they tie directly into a current movie or tv project because there is no interest among a vast majority of current readers in that material, so why should it even be a concern for a publisher whose primary concern is selling current material?

Where's the hard data that continued numbering sells better in the current market? Where's the hard data that back issue sales pump new issue sales in the current market of 2016? If they do a cost/benefit analysis of revenue loss and gains for keeping numbering versus putting out #1s, what do you think the data is going to tell them for the short and long term? The current market is not the same market as 1976, 1986, 1996 or even 2006. Tactics, tendencies, and policies form those eras won't do anything in the current market except put a company under. The market evolves and sales patterns have to evolve with it, not throw back to another era that doesn't reflect the buying pattern and preferences of the current customer base.

-M

THere's no hard evidence, since the market is continually changing, but what they're doing right now isn't working, so why not try something else?