spiderfrommars wrote:Is the ASM reboot permanent?
Gah.
That's the intent. Then again, the intent of the Clone Saga was to replace Peter with Ben Reilly permanently, so...
Here's what I see happening.
As I've said before, attracting new readers to comics is next to impossible. To read a modern comic book story takes six months (of reading about 10 minutes of story at a time), about 18 dollars, and six trips to a comic book store. That's not an appealing concept to new readers. Instead, the comic industry has a finite pool of readers. When books do well, it's not because of non-fans reading them, it's because the guy who reads Batman every week decided to give Spider-Man a try.
So what does this mean for ASM?
If all of the accounts can be believed, a lot of people are going to drop ASM. That's not good, considering that the cost of publishing ASM is obviously going up (it's shipping three times a month now). Due to all the controversy, a bunch of people will probably pick up the first few issues when they see it at their comic shops, though. That means Brand New Day will probably see numbers right around where they were during One More Day, at first. However, not many Non Spider-Man fans are going to want to commit to a book that ships three times a month. Also, and this is the obvious thing that many people seem to overlook, people who weren't reading Spider-Man aren't going to say, "Wow! Spider-Man's single again! I'M single! I am suddenly interested in the character!" If they didn't care enough to read about Spider-Man before, they probably won't care to now. Because of this, over the next few months, you'll probably see a steady decline in sales of Amazing Spider-Man. Eventually, the numbers won't justify the cost of a thrice-monthly book. Hopefully, by then, everyone involved with the book will understand what a giant mistake this will have been. They'll undo the "deal with the devil" and return to the "once a month" format. Chances are, they'll call the story "End of the Day" or "End of Days."
How bad is this book selling? Well, as you know, there were two covers to each issue. The regular covers and the variant covers. Here's a set of variant covers on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/AMAZING-SPIDER-MAN- ... dZViewItem
Note that it ended at cover price. Looking at auctions that are ending soon, it looks as though even the variants will be selling for BELOW cover in the very near future.
