How do you react to people who say you ruined Marvel with Heroes Return when you started doing relaunches with each major change in a creative team instead of keeping the original numbering and left readers getting confused as to which volume comes first?
Answer:
Comic companies relaunching, renumbering and rebooting their books in a PR game - on the surface its to attract readers to buy the books. But I think it’s more about simply getting people and writers to “talk” about their books. Who cares if no one actually buys them, right? But somewhere along the line it turns off as many readers as it attracts. What’s telling in Mr. Brevoort’s and Mr. Busiek’s responses is their mocking tone rather than answer a legitimate question. They clearly are towing the company line. And neither seem interesting in keeping old readers. Both Marvel and DC have been building castles on sand. I’m guessing their don’t really care about the number of issues purchased as long as the media and blogosphere talk about their characters. Their characters are worth billions in movie tickets and merchandising. Who cares if no one actually reads the books. The budgets for their comic books are probably pocket change to the media empires who own them. @kurtbusiek @brevoortformspringI shrug my shoulders and move on with my life. What would you expect?
Surely, if someone’s going to complain about renumbering series on relaunches, they’d cite Heroes Reborn before Heroes Return, since it literally did it a year earlier. And I don’t think many people wanted us to continue the Heroes Reborn numbering, starting all the relaunches with, what, #14?
