We don't need this many number ones

I love the serialised nature of regular comic books and adore big long runs by the same creative team, but they don't always make that easy for you.

I did, for instance, once really want to get into Jason Aaron's Thor comics - because they sounded like a lot of Viking fun - but by the time I started seeking it out, there were already three or four different volume ones, with more to come.

I couldn't follow the order of them all and the endless relaunches are constantly making me feeling left behind. Until the 2000s, the various Justice League of America comics all notched up more than 100 issues, but there have been six or seven new Justice League #1s in the new century, and I literally have no idea what order they come in.

This is partly due to the general glut of mainstream comics - I felt genuinely bummed when they followed up Hickman's House of X thing with seven immediate new titles, if they just had one X-Men book, I would have got it.

But as much as the comic companies only seem to be interested in the extremely short-term benefits of a new number one, the restarting definitely hurts in the long term. How many Daredevil Volume Ones does the world need - that's another title that has ben particularly egregious at rebooting back to #1, even with the same creative team involved.

I could tell you a vague history of everything that happens in the Avengers title up to, say, #300, but not anything in the past couple of decades when they keep closing out around 32 issues.

Sometimes the long runs, like those Aaron Thor comics, get collected in massive, heavy books, but even if I could afford something like that - which would easily run into the hundreds of dollars - it's not a great format. 

And all I really want is an easy way to follow a single story, with sequential numbers, or something like that. That might be an archaic idea, but it still works.