Anonymous asked: You say "The marketplace is Darwinian.If there are multiple X-Men titles, it’s because that’s what you and your fellow readers buy every month in quantity." Just curious why you think there weren't so many X-Men titles -- or double shipping -- in the 1980s? Isn't it more about evolving biz strategy than what readers will buy?
Well, everything was different in the 1980s. At that point, the Newsstand was still the majority of the marketplace for most of that decade. But even there, you had double-shipping during the summer months by right around the end of that decade, and you’d gone from a single X-MEN title to four of them. So yes, the marketplace situations change and you’re always reacting to those changes in different ways. But what we’re doing now isn’t really dissimilar to what we were doing then. (The Annual, by the way, was invented in order to get another issue of a popular monthly magazine onto the racks during the peak selling months.)
