Marvel Numbering

To be honest I haven’t bought a lot of comics in the past year.  I buy Flash more out of habit than anything at this point and the other few titles I’ve bought haven’t been from the big two.  I do like to keep up on what is going on in books though.  It’s because of this I was quick to read an announcement that Beta Ray Bill was going to be making an appearance in the new Nova comic.  I’m a huge Beta Ray Bill fan so I was excited to see what was going on.  The cover for the book he’ll be showing up in is posted below. 

 

The first thing you notice is that Beta Ray Bill is a bad ass.  This is normal and it’s how he should be portrayed.  The second thing you probably notice is the giant number one in the right hand corner.  The funny thing about the number one is that this is issue number 13.  You can actually see the 013. printed much smaller down on the bottom right hand corner.  Now it is entirely possible that this is only a promotional image and the real comic will not have a giant number one on the cover.  But if the comic does ship that way it is pretty interesting.

There will always be debate in comics if restarting numbering is more important than having huge issue numbers.  New number ones seem like a fresh start, but you can’t have a 100^th issue if you renumber every year.  Is Marvel going to start numbering their story arcs?  Would you jump into a comic you’ve never read before if they were on the third story in an arc of a book that’s on issue 20?  Again I’m speculating a lot over an image that might not even hit the comic stands that way.  It was something I noticed yesterday and haven’t been able to stop thinking about.