New Brevoort Formspring

No, it wouldn’t. And that has everything to do with the way comics are sold and consumed today, as opposed to in the past.

Back when that kind of thing was most prevalent, there were fewer titles overall, and all of them were sold on the newsstand as periodicals. So greater attention was paid to what stories were coming out at that same time–it was easier, and it seemed more important. They were a way to entice readers to buy another book currently on sale.

But we now live in a world where more and more of our readership’s format of preference is the collected edition. And in that format, those notes become a bother, a distraction. And the impetus to pick up another book isn’t the same at that price point.

On top of which, we produce more titles overall, and more titles featuring common characters, which makes this more difficult to police.

All of which has led us to our present philosophy, which is that for those readers that care about such things, once all of the stories are concluded, they’ll be able to work out their sequence for themselves. But for those that don’t care, for those who simply want to read a good X-MEN story, it’s not something they need to worry about or feel like they’re missing out on.

The same sort of thing is true of our recap pages. Time was, you’d get a full page in the books recounting what transpired in the previous issue(s), because if you missed them, that was the only way to get that information. But when you collect six of said issues into a single volume, that repetition becomes bothersome–the story stops every 20 pages so that some character can tell you about all of the stuff that you just read. By switching over to the recap page model, we can discard those pages more easily in a collected edition, and provide that format with a better reading experience without disturbing the functionality of the serial version.