{"id":4003,"date":"2018-02-20T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T17:37:12","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T22:37:12","slug":"tough-times-for-legacy-numbering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/20\/tough-times-for-legacy-numbering\/","title":{"rendered":"UPDATED: Legacy numbering to be preserved in Marvel’s Fresh Start; Mad reboots after #550"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With Marvel’s Legacy<\/b> event, attention turned last fall to numbering on comics \u2014 and we released our updated and exhaustive legacy numbering survey<\/a><\/b>, looking at the highest-numbered North American comic book series across time.<\/p>\n

A few things have changed since then: several of those Marvel titles had already ended or have had final issues announced, and DC<\/b> restored the numbering on its longest-running titles in advance of April 18’s\u00a0Action Comics<\/i>\u00a0#1000<\/a><\/b>, which is also getting a hardcover companion volume<\/b><\/a>, and Detective Comics #1000<\/i><\/b>, which is still some time off.<\/p>\n

Now, this week comes two items of significance for legacy numbering industrywide; first, Marvel began rolling out its plans for its “Fresh Start” event<\/a><\/b>\u00a0launching in May, essentially restarting its renumbered series yet again, starting with a new Avengers title. IGN reported that Executive Editor Tom Brevoort<\/b> “did express an interest in keeping the legacy numbering around in subordinate fashion for select titles, but ultimately he favors keeping things as clear and unconfusing as possible for readers.”<\/p>\n

[UPDATE: <\/b>While the IGN report was as described above, Marvel posted Tuesday afternoon that <\/b>it will be providing dual numbering on its titles<\/a><\/b>.]\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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Shadow numbering<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

It’s a short run for this round of renumbering, and a reminder of the different and conflicting demands on numbering in general. While the benefit from legacy numbering is one that accrues over long periods as retailers don’t have to keep starting new subscriber files on titles, the greatest interest in continuous numbering comes from the aftermarket, which values ease of identification and which publishers receive benefits from less directly. Publishers see direct benefits more often from round-numbered anniversary issues \u2014 which is why we’ve seen publishers like Marvel and DC do restarts only to hop back for the anniversaries, as in the DC case above.<\/p>\n

One option open to Marvel could be something like the “shadow numbering” the company did in the early 2000s, putting both figures on the cover, though perhaps in a way that the collector cognoscenti would be able to figure out, without confusing the new reader.\u00a0[UPDATE: As noted in the above addendum, dual numbering appears to be what they’ve decided on, although as in the early 2000s case, the issue number that price guides and archivists generally refer to is whatever’s in the indicia. We’ll see how Diamond lists them<\/b>.]\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"In connected news,\u00a0 somewhat surprisingly, DC sources announced that\u00a0Mad<\/i>\u00a0would mark its move to the West Coast with a new #1<\/b><\/a>, ending the previous series with #550, the April cover-dated issue. For decades,\u00a0Mad<\/i>‘s status as a magazine, selling mostly on newsstands and through subscriptions, tended to isolate it from Direct Market numbering tactics; issue numbers aren’t of importance in magazine market orders, and in fact the final Ingram order form included no issue numbers at all. But with DC’s pullback from the newsstand<\/a><\/b>, the Direct Market’s influence on the title would presumably increase.<\/p>\n

Mad had the clearest claim to being the longest-running current series with unbroken publication and<\/i> numbering; the next candidate on the list, Heavy Metal<\/i><\/b>, didn’t have ordinal numbering for many years, and its issue count contains a number of special editions not part of the series’ regular run. So it’s a race then between various Archie digests and\u00a0Spawn<\/i><\/b>, now in their high 200s.<\/p>\n

Without knowing the Marvel situation \u2014 or DC’s plans for its legacy titles over the next few years \u2014 it’s unclear what our next five-year survey<\/a><\/b> will look like in 2020. We can say that 2015’s highest-numbered issue, Walt Disney Comics & Stories<\/a>, <\/b>just had its 741st issue come\u00a0out from IDW<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Marvel’s Legacy event, attention turned last fall to numbering on comics \u2014 and we released our updated and exhaustive legacy numbering survey, looking at the highest-numbered North American comic book series across time. A few things have changed since then: several of those Marvel titles had already ended or have had final issues announced, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-4003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-comics-numbering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4003"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6286,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4003\/revisions\/6286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}