The “new reader friendly” problem

How do you get new readers to start reading your titles?  That’s the question that haunts comic companies and creator on a daily basis.  This is a business after all.  And the point of business is to make money.  It troubles the large and small.  This article mainly deals with the larger companies.  They are the ones that have comics that people have at least heard about, but are choosing not to buy them.

There are many reasons that people don’t buy comics from the larger companies, but the one I want to focus on is continuity.  To many people, it can be quite intimidating picking up a comic that has decades of history behind it.  Others aren’t necessarily concerned about the decades of history, but rather not knowing what is going on with the more recent storylines.  To try to combat this, companies try to market certain issues as “new reader friendly” or “jumping on points.”

The most common way of marketing something as a jumping on point is by re-launching the book with a new #1 issue.  But I’m here to tell you that this is very rarely new reader friendly.  When Marvel released Uncanny X-Men #1, it wasn’t something a new reader could just pick up on.  This issue was set up by events that have been happening for years within the X-titles.  When DC launched their New 52 initiative, there was more of an effort to actually start the titles over, but this wasn’t the case with the Batman and Green Lantern family of titles.  They just continued on with storylines that have been going on for years.