{"id":5261,"date":"2011-06-01T18:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T18:14:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T16:47:20","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T21:47:20","slug":"heroes-reborn-vs-heroes-return-tale-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/01\/heroes-reborn-vs-heroes-return-tale-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Heroes Reborn vs. Heroes Return: Tale of two restarts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After doing some research yesterday for my post on restarts<\/b><\/a> inspired by the big news that DC is restarting much of its line at #1, I realized a clarification was necessary to a conversation I had with ComicBookResources’ Kiel Phegley<\/b><\/a> before all this news broke: specifically, relating to the differences between the sales tracks for “Heroes Reborn,” the 1996 replacement of Marvel’s Avengers, Captain America, Fantastic Four<\/b><\/i>, and Iron Man<\/b><\/i> with continuity-rebooting new titles by Jim Lee<\/b> and Rob Liefeld<\/b>, and “Heroes Return,” the 1997 renumbering and restoration of those series to the mainline Marvel universe.<\/p>\n

As I noted here yesterday<\/b><\/a> and in Comics Buyer’s Guide<\/i> #1614<\/b>, it was “Heroes Return” for which we saw orders returning to where they were before the renumbering rather quickly; “Heroes Reborn,” in fact, we do not have the “before” numbers for because September 1996 was when I began getting reports from Heroes World, Marvel’s exclusive distributor. There is no source for direct market sales for those titles before the reboot. I appeared to conflate the two in the quote on CBR, which I correct here now.<\/p>\n

While sales did fall dramatically from the first-issue highs on the “Heroes Reborn” books, I do believe, looking at the Statements of Ownership that are available, that the titles did maintain sales levels substantially higher than the titles they replaced for their whole one-year runs. We are correct in saying that the Volume 3 “Heroes Return” titles soon went back to pre-renumbering sales (when compared to Volume 2), but not so for the Volume 2 “Heroes Reborn” titles (when compared to Volume 1). Here are the known numbers, for all to peruse:<\/p>\n

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