Issue Numbering Is A Flat Circle

Okay, I might be ready to check out of the whole Marvel Now initiative. Because this Web site is about two and a half years old, and I believe that this week’s Secret Avengers #1 is the third Goddamned Secret Avengers #1 in that amount of time. Plus, there’s yet another first issue of a comic book with the word “Avengers” in the title, the 14th or 15th third issue of a Wolverine book since last year’s SDCC, and I think the (literally) tenth version of a Captain Marvel #1.

Look, I get that Marvel made the conscious decision, in the face of the initial success of DC’s New 52 reboot in 2011, to do their own rolling “reboot” where the characters stay in continuity but they can renumber to a first issue whenever they need to temporarily bump circulation back up to the point where Ike Perlmutter will give the creative team the key to the men’s room toilet paper dispenser.

I remember being a kid with a 75-cent a week allowance and becoming giddy with excitement whenever I found a new first issue. I am now 42 years old, with an income large enough that I could easily buy any of those 70s first issues, and, having seen my second first issue of Wolverine in less than a year, I now feel a certain amount of comfort in seeing triple-digit issue numbers from Robert Kirkman comics.

But that’s the cool thing about comics: even though I am a little tired of being spoon-fed first issues, at least they mean new creative teams. Combine that with a couple of new high-numbered issues to remind me that this is, after all, long-term episodic storytelling, and it means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

So yeah, we have a few new first issues, but we also have a new issue of the Mighty Avengers (which is my current bar-none favorite Avengers title), a new Hawkeye, a new Batman, the final issue of Frank Miller’s and Steven Grant’s Robocop: Last Stand (featuring the real 1987 Robocop), and a bunch of other cool stuff!

And even though I’m a little tired of these forced series renumberings, new comics equals good. And whether it’s an issue #1 or issue #500, before we can talk about any of them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!