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Hey guys,

So I was gifted the hardcover trade of Powers/House of X. It's real good! and it's basically 12 issues from 2 series that were releasing at the same time for 6 months to establish the new status quo for the mutants in Marvel comics.

At the end of it there was a launch of 6 new x based series.

X-Men
X-Force
Excalibur
Fallen Angles
New Mutants
Marauders

Easy right?

Now traditionally each of these comics would run 1 a month for 6 months and then be collected into 6 different trade paperbacks. A Vol 1 for each series. Instead, they are being collected together into a trade titled Dawn of X. Dawn of X Vol 1 has issue 1 of all 6 series. Dawn of X Vol 2 is issue 2 of all 6 series. The end result is you are following the entire Xmen series together even as the individual characters go off on their individual adventures and instead of buying individual issues (whos sales have been plummeting for a long time) you get a new trade each month (whos sales have been increasing) instead of twice a year. Personally, I love this.

I can't help but feel like this might be an experiment by Marvel that has bigger implications. If individual issues sales keep going down and trades go up then why not make trades a part of your monthly figures instead of bi annually? Why not run 6 other series together... or 3 Avengers books and then release a Bi Monthly trade?

There is a upcoming Xmen cross over event called X of Swords. Except in trade format it won't interrupt the trade collections it's just going to be Dawn of X Vol. 8 or whatever.

I think this is really interesting. There is a potential major shift in the way series are planned and published here. What do you guys think?

This is a great idea. If they do it right, they could overcome two of the big weaknesses of monthly single issues.

One, selling comics in a trade format is superior to individual comic books. Even if there were no financial saving (which there probably is), it gets rid of the barrier to entry/hassle of finding and buying a bunch of individual issues. Trade paperbacks are also easier to read and store, and just look classier than single issues.

Two, what a great way to expand sales. Crossovers seemed to cause more problems than they solved, and from my experience rarely convinced anyone to start buying a new series. But bundling up three series one follows with two series one wouldn’t normally get... that’s a good way to get customers reading more series. It sounds like those old Shone Jump books, but more coherent.

It looks like 44 page individual issues are 4.99 (and I am sure some part of that 44 pages is ads). A trade tends to be 15.99-17.99. Dawn of X V1 is 24.99 but v2 forward is closer to the 15.00.

So Volume 1 essentially gets you 1 issue for free and 2 forward is something like 1/3rd to half off.

Also, doing a search I found out the bi annually individual series trades also get made. So if all you want is the main X Men series you can just wait to get those after issue 6 is released.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
This is a great idea. If they do it right, they could overcome two of the big weaknesses of monthly single issues.

One, selling comics in a trade format is superior to individual comic books. Even if there were no financial saving (which there probably is), it gets rid of the barrier to entry/hassle of finding and buying a bunch of individual issues. Trade paperbacks are also easier to read and store, and just look classier than single issues.

Two, what a great way to expand sales. Crossovers seemed to cause more problems than they solved, and from my experience rarely convinced anyone to start buying a new series. But bundling up three series one follows with two series one wouldn’t normally get... that’s a good way to get customers reading more series. It sounds like those old Shone Jump books, but more coherent.

Agreed on both points. The second one especially. Could you imagine collecting the entire Civil War event with individual issues?!?
It seems that this method may also help avert the pitfalls of events like Final Crisis. While Final Crisis was pretty cool, a lot of context was missed unless you read several other events (Death of the New Gods, anything associated with the Monitors, the entirety of Countdown) which were not as closely related to each other. By keeping the X-Men stories bundled a bit more closely, things can be coordinated to have a more compact plot. You wouldn’t have to read the back catalogue of every series up until that point.