Why did Marvel restart the Spider-Man titles from #1?
Because the Marketing guys decided it was a good idea. But if you’re curious about their reasons for doing so, here’s our cynical two-cents worth. When comic sales are down, there are two ways to push sales back up. Either recover your former fans… which means hiring decent talent for the comics. That involves editorial and management integrity, which isn’t easy to find in modern corporates. The alternative is to renumber the comics to #1 so that young fans have a point to start collecting. As a young fan, it’s a bit discouraging to see #783 on the front of a comic book, and to realise that they are coming in so late in the series – so a re-numbering can help provide a jump-on point. Combine that with the words “#1” and “Collector’s Edition”, add a couple of variant covers, and you have the Spider-Man Reboot, which took place in January 1999. In practice, it doesn’t really make much lasting difference, except to annoy long-time fans, to make life more difficult for archivists like ou
