New Brevoort Formspring

This one is just sky-is-falling paranoia. You know what else you could say this about? The Comics Code. And yet, comics have done just fine without it for years and years now. The situation that created the massive contraction of the marketplace in the mid-90s was a lot more complex and complicated than simple “there were specialty covers”–way, way more. It’s a fallacy to boil it down to that, let alone to equate that to the numbering changes.

And touting great jumping on points certainly helps the cause of comics. If it didn’t, if the process didn’t work, then all of those new #1s wouldn’t work every single time they are tried, and we and everybody else would stop doing them. The biggest success DC has had in a decade came when they restarted their entire line from #1.

Bottom line here: every point you listed (except maybe the missing #5, which I didn’t get) is about nostalgia and a fear of change more than anything else. Look, you feel the way you feel, but it would be foolish and self-defeating of me to run my business in the manner it may have been run in 1992 or 1983 or 1967 just to make a few long-time readers feel comfortable. The needs of the many, and the needs of the now, are going to be more vital in terms of keeping the industry and Marvel vital and alive in the long-term.