I have no idea what the number on the cover of a comic book has to do with quality or making a quality product.  If you can explain, please do.  

I'm really glad that you added in that last part.  Because you reap what you sow.  If the fans didn't want it they could vote with their wallets.  They just keep on buying which says to the business-folk that this is what they want.  

Exactly. I've long since stopped focusing on the companies (or politicians in politics) because they are what they are. It's the public (fans in this case) who are the real perpetrators of mediocrity. I say this as someone who was a part of the problem for years, buying titles that I had long since stopped caring about simply out of habit.

None of the Essential line is currently in print. They have discontinued the line. Very few of the Masterworks went back to print after their first printing sold out. Marvel has no evergreen sellers in trade paperback or hardcover format, i.e. no trades that have not gone out of print. The closest they have had to that is the Ultimate Spider-Man volumes, but even they have now gone out of print on several of the volumes. The only other contender for an evergreen book from Marvel has been Civil War, which was out of print only for a short while before the Captain America Civil War movie was announced. The have put the reprinted material in new formats at times (Omnibus, Masterworks, Essentials, Epic, etc.) but none of the actual books from those lines have stayed in print and a large portion of the customer base is repeat customers buying the same material in each new format not new people buying the material and keeping it in print. Modern reprints have larger print runs and get reprinted faster by Marvel than their classic material does. What classic material does get reprinted is done so in conjunction with which properties are featured on television or in the movies currently, and only stay in print while the that feature is prominent. When Agents of SHIELD hit the TV screens, the SHIELD material that was long out of print got a new printing, it has mostly sold out, is not getting another printing and will soon be out of print and warehouse supplies of it were already cleared out by Marvel at bargain prices to retailers. Several Dr. Strange volumes have been brought back to print since the movie was announced, when they sell out of the first printings, they will go back to being out of print, etc. There is no sustained demand for the product.

And wildfire, you're telling me you don't think a large, multinational selling machine like Disney with vast corporate resources that would exploit anything under their umbrella to the utmost if it meant a penny more revenue hasn't done their due diligence with market research on how to best exploit the current print market for Marvel characters to see how to best exploit the properties they have acquired and spent billions of dollars to get? The same company that vetted the market and decided it was better to license the classic Disney characters to another publisher rather than publish them under the Marvel imprint because they would make more money from the license than they would publishing the books? This company doesn't know how well something will work without actually trying it first and throwing money at a model that was abandoned because it wasn't working to see if magically 20 years later it might tart working again even though nothing in the current market gives an indication that it would?

I wouldn't want to be the suit that goes into a meeting and recommends that we stop current publishing models and guarantee a drop in revenue x amount of a percent in the short term by stopping #1s and multiple volumes on the hope that maybe if we try this at some point we might possibly see a long term growth if market conditions from 30 years ago still hold true or come back into fashion even though we have no indication form current market trends that this is likely to occur but we won't know until we try it will we?

-M

You made great points here and I applaud you for that and I didn't think of that. Kudos for you!

I find it astonishing that hardcore comics fans can keep track of the most extreme minutiae when it comes to continuity, cameos, cross-overs, shared universes, creative teams, art fixes by Romita's Raiders, origins, retcons, first appearances, why Peter Parker's socks changed color from panel 1 to 3 in a given issue, what the sequencing of certain classes of Starships are supposed to be in Star Trek: TOS, etc. but get completely flustered when a series changes volumes and issue numbering. Like suddenly their ability to keep track of comic data and organize their comics in boxes suddenly disappears. There must be krytonite in them thar' issue numbers.

-M