Marvel Comics wants you to catch up on some of their biggest series, and starting in February, they’re going to give you that chance, as they roll out a new initiative labeled Marvel Point One.
Announced Tuesday during a conference call with Marvel editors Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort, and SVP of Sales and Circulation David Gabriel, Marvel Point One will add an extra issue to many of Marvel’s leading series. Each issue will feature a lower price of $2.99 and will tell a self-contained story that serves as a jumping-on point for the series, laying the groundwork for the next year’s worth of stories. Each issue will be written by the regular series writer and most (but not all) will be drawn by the regular series artist.
See below for a list of the first three months of .1 issues.
The goal of the “Point One” as stated by Marvel is to offer new readers an easy point at which they can jump onto a series that they may not be reading. Marvel has tried similar things in the past, most recently their free “Saga” issues that seek to catch readers up. However, where the “Saga” issues have the advantage of being free, they have the disadvantage of being fairly boring text pieces, and not a dynamic, exciting story that is more likely to create a new reader. By giving readers a cheaper example of what each series is like, I’m sure they hope that they can attract some new readers to those series.
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