The Legacy event — which will revise the issue numbering of many of its titles to restore their original numbering, or something close to it — released today, and it recalled that more than a decade ago, I had written a piece on what I termed “legacy titles” and their numbering for Comics Buyer’s Guide, along with grids showing every title numbered above #100 at five year intervals beginning with 1935.
So now that readers have had a look at Marvel Legacy #1, I offer an updated list of those titles here on the site in our FAQ section: “How Legacy Numbering Has Changed Over Time.” In addition to adding data for 2010 and 2015, there’s a new essay about the origins of whole numbering in comics and the reasons that publishers have restarted titles in the past, as well as some reasons why, as Marvel has, they sometimes seek to recover a series’ original numbering.
Additionally, I have a graphic showing how legacy numbering has changed across time, which clearly depicts the trends involved. You can see when several of the older publishers went away at once; likewise, you can see the echoes of events like Crisis on Infinite Earths. And depending on how long Legacy’s changes continue, there may be significant shifts in the 2020 table on the next update. Time will tell.
Comichron founder John Jackson Miller has tracked the comics industry for more than 25 years, including a decade editing the industry’s retail trade magazine; he is the author of several guides to comics, as well as more than a hundred comic books for various franchises.
He is the author of novels including Star Wars: Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Dawn, Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War, and his upcoming release, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The High Country. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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