nolapfau asked:

How do you feel about the idea that multiple titles within a given family (such as multiple Avengers or X-books) hurts the chances of continued success for other books outside of those groups? Do we really need four X-Men titles telling the same interconnected story? I loved the idea of Fearless Defenders, for instance, but I didn't have room for it in my budget, due to things like BotA (which, admittedly, is great, but doesn't necessarily need to happen at the pace of a book every week).

brevoortformspring answered:

I believe the notion that the existence of some books prevents the success of other books is nonsense, frankly. Put it this way: if DC suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I wouldn’t expect that our numbers would go up dramatically. All that wold happen is that people who wanted to read those DC books couldn’t anymore, and they’d sift their time and money to something else—and not necessarily us. The marketplace is Darwinian.If there are multiple X-Men titles, it’s because that’s what you and your fellow readers buy every month in quantity—it’s what you as a group prove that you want. At the end of the day, saying that you’d like to have read FEARLESS DEFENDER but couldn’t afford to because you were following BATTLE OF THE ATOM proves the point. When faced with that decision as a consumer, you (and a lot of other people like you), chose X-MEN. That’s not a confidence trick, that’s one thing being more popular and more successful than another. And so that book lives, and the other book dies.

[onionhighonionandrenown]

Tom, you’re ignoring the point of angryknifeman’s question.  Do we really need four interconnected X-books telling the same story?

(I mean, I don’t think so and I don’t buy the books, so it’s obvious what I think.  But surely there has to be something more to this than cold numbers.)

[nolapfau]

I don’t ascribe to Tom the nonsense that a lot of other readers do, but I will admit it’s frustrating to have him completely redirect my question when I’m asking it openly and honestly. He says it’s not a confidence trick, but if I have to choose a book FOUR times instead of once in a month, it certainly doesn’t seem evenly weighted to me.

At any rate, he’s done a wonderful job of inspiring me to drop most of my X-books.