"Every issue is somebody's first."

Anyone who's been reading comics for any length of time is bound to have heard this mantra more times than they can count. It's the traditional justification for making sure that every issue of every comic is as accessible as possible, for the benefit of the elusive New Reader. But how far does it still hold water?

These days, it seems more generally accurate to say that every issue is somebody's last. Most comics seem to follow a straightforward sales pattern. They enter high with their first issue - or get a significant sales boost on the back of a clearly-promoted relaunch with a new creative team (effectively making it a first issue). And then they fall. Fast or slow, but they fall. And they fall until either they bottom out and hit a plateau; or they die; or they get relaunched again.

These days, it seems every issue is somebody's last. Now, there are exceptions - a handful of books which launched high and actually climbed. Kevin Smith's GREEN ARROW. J Michael Straczynski's AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. Bruce Jones' HULK. ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN. And some manage to plateau at fairly high sales levels. But those comics which pick up new readers as they go along seem to be the exception to the rule. Most comics can only manage it with a relaunch.

But what's wrong with that? Far from being cause for concern, it strikes me as a sign that the readers are behaving eminently sensibly.

The "every issue is somebody's first" model makes sense if your publishing model is that a series is supposed to go on indefinitely with no proper beginning, middle or end. Clearly, if you're into your fifth decade of Superman stories, you can't seriously expect your audience to read the entire history. Most of your target demographic not only lacks the inclination, they also lack the ability, since the stories were published before they were born and are long since out of print. So if the aim is to do an indefinite Superman series, then that premise calls for a regular turnover of new readers, and stories structured in such a way that people can jump on relatively easily at any time.

In contrast, these days most ongoing series put great emphasis on overall story arcs. Why would a reader want to come in halfway through? No matter how good a story might be, there's an obvious disincentive to start reading it at Act Three. And there's an equally obvious incentive to go and read something else instead - something where you can get in on the ground floor and enjoy the story as a whole, the way its creators presumably intended. This isn't pigheaded obstinacy on the part of the readers, but a perfectly sensible reluctance to spend money on incomplete stories.

This reasoning is, if anything, even more pronounced when you move outside the superhero books. Why would anyone want to start reading, say, TRANSMETROPOLITAN in monthly form at this late stage? It's not a question of the plot being inaccessible, in the sense of the narrative being hard to follow. Few newcomers would have serious difficulties understanding the plot of the most recent issue. But the end of that issue is a pay-off that works because it follows on months of build-up. That can be explained to new readers, but it's much harder for them to feel the moment. Reading a series from the start by buying the trade paperbacks - now an option for an increasing number of books - is a much more attractive option than trying to play catch-up in the dying days of the plot.

This isn't to say that new reader accessibility isn't worth aiming for. Many stories that are now being published simply don't lend themselves to the same degree of accessibility that used to be commonplace. Not that this is a bad thing. It's just a trade-off, of complexity over ease of understanding. This is compounded by the fact that most series are now written with at least half an eye on trade paperback collection from the outset. The old trick of shamelessly recapping the plot with a page-long flashback in the opening scene was always a little awkward, but it looks positively grating in a trade paperback collection. (Actually, this is just one of many issues that I think make the "monthly serialisation and trade paperback collection" format an unsatisfactory compromise, where creators try to hammer the same peg into two differently-shaped holes. But that's another column.)

Now, this isn't to say that new reader accessibility isn't worth aiming for. All things being equal, it's obviously desirable. There's nothing big or clever about making the plot impenetrable just for the sake of doing so. It simply means that accessibility slides down the order of priorities somewhat, and will more frequently be sacrificed in favour of other artistic criteria, so that stories will be less likely to grind to a halt and recap their plot. To my mind, the best compromise here, and one which is still remarkably underused, is for serialised stories to simply publish a recap at the beginning of the issue, separate from the story itself. Then you can have a recap for the newcomers, if you're really serious about trying to find any, without clogging up the story itself. Of course, this takes up a page which could otherwise have been used for something else. But hell, I can't think of many letters pages which I'd particularly miss.

The recent squabbling between Peter David and Joe Quesada led to some discussion about whether Marvel's lower selling titles BLACK PANTHER and CAPTAIN MARVEL had been harmed by a lack of accessibility. I don't think it was a major factor in either case, but the point is still worth looking at. Particularly so in the case of CAPTAIN MARVEL, which is now making a positive bid to buck trends by getting in new readers without a relaunch or a change of creative team. If that's what they want to do, then accessibility will indeed be an issue.

A book inaccessible to its own readers certainly has issues to address. BLACK PANTHER is the sort of book whose stories make it difficult for it to be fully accessible. Christopher Priest's plots are frequently incredibly dense, and most issues are packed with information for readers to try and assimilate. Packing that quantity of data into a handy two paragraph synopsis for the next issue is impossible. The book gives it a try anyway, through a first person narrative from a supporting character who provides the audience's point of view and attempts to make sense of the plot for them. And those recaps do serve a handy purpose - they remind existing readers of what happened last month. But anyone joining a storyline halfway through will find the book takes effort to get into. Personally, I think it's a worthwhile trade.

CAPTAIN MARVEL has different problems. Its stories are not excessively complex in and of themselves, and comprehending the narrative is not such an issue. Unfortunately, this week's issue #30 is almost a textbook example of a story with accessibility problems. It's a little unfortunate that this particular story happens to be the one that comes onto the market on the back of the series having so much attention.

The story plays extensively off concepts from previous Peter David stories, which are given a cursory explanation, seemingly on the assumption that the majority of readers are likely to be familiar with them already. The final act of the storyline simply dumps characters from David's HULK stories into the plot without any real explanation of who they are or what they're doing there. Yes, there's a token explanation of who the Maestro is, but given that he's the secondary antagonist for the issue, a little more than "He's the evil Hulk from the future" is required for me to give a toss. For readers who don't have the context provided by David's HULK stories, the story is certainly comprehensible, but feels disconnected and inconsequential. In fact, part of this book's problem is that it often reads like a continuation of HULK rather than a series about its title character.

A book which is inaccessible to its own readers certainly has some issues to address, but that's a special case. It's going to take a lot more than increased accessibility to boost sales significantly - that involves bucking the market trends. At the very least, some sort of publicity campaign will be needed (such as, perhaps, the one we've just witnessed, whether it was intentional or otherwise).

But the logic that used to make accessibility so important no longer has the power that it once did. The stories have moved on, and the readership no longer wants to join in halfway through. Why should they? And if they don't want to, why make compromises to cater for it?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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