Say what you will of the new 52, it was rather successful. DC sales are their highest in years, they dominate in number of comics sold month after month and, more than anything, it got people talking, which is a success in it's own right.

With that in our minds, I've been noticing since the second month or so after the reboot that many people keep posting in the comments about how Marvel SHOULD do something in a similar vein, and how they absolutely will not pick up one of their titles until they do.

In many cases it's fairly obvious why people might want that. Nowadays there's over 50 years of marvel continuity that can, and does, occasionally come into play during their story-lines, hundreds of characters and teams and events that people might find confusing. For some, it's intimidating to jump into spider-man when there's over 680 issues, or to pick up one of the many X-books churned out every month. So I can understand the desire for it in theory.

HOWEVER in order to decide whether or not Marvel should do something as drastic as a line-wide reboot, we have to consider why DC did theirs. As any comic book fan will tell you, comic sales have all dropped since the end of the 90's, and DC was hit just like all the others. DC often under performed compared to Marvel, for whatever reason, and Marvel often had better success marketing it's toy, related products and adaptations (the recent explosion of Marvel movies should prove just that). While nowadays the top 10 selling comic books tend to be DC titles, Marvel still often wins the market share, and from what I've been reading lately, comic sales are up across the industry, so from a financial perspective they might not have the same need to do a reboot as DC did.

Another reason DC did their reboot was to strengthen continuity between their stories, to make sure people don't get confused by contradictory events and are able to make sense of the timeline and continuity of certain events. DC more than anyone has been guilty of this, from destroying the Multiverse in the first Crisis, to restoring it in 52, to making story lines like countdown to final crisis, which was retconned because it contradicted certain events that were written for Final Crisis. But if you can say anything about Marvel, it's that they're real precise about making sure they're continuity fits in with each other. While because of the sliding time scale, some characters age differently than others, and some things are often written out of existence for whatever reason, and the occasionally confusing way Marvel's multiverse works in relation to earth - 616, they still have a rather solid foundation.

Ultimately there's only two real reasons one would want a complete relaunch. The first is because of Marvel's recent trend to create large, year long events that drastically change the shape of the universe for years to come. While some might enjoy such things and the reprieve they give us from the cyclical nature of comics, the fact is that the best of these events are lukewarmly received by the general audience at best. Fear Itself is the most recent, and probably the one with the biggest "Meh" reception I've seen. This is bad enough, but often events from well over 10 years ago can come into play rather often, which might make it harder for some to jump right into the stories.

The other reason is just the numbering of the book. One of the reasons I haven't picked up something like Amazing Spider-man, or, until recently, X-Factor, Is because it can seem like a daunting task to get yourself caught up with the new status quo when you see that there's at least 80 issues of backlog that explain all the bits and pieces of past arcs. While it is of course a fact that there are a ton of jumping on points and .1 issues to catch you up, it can still be intimidating, which I think is what throws most people off.

In the end, though, I think the Marvel universe as is should remain untouched. It might be harder than DC is at the moment to start reading, but it's certainly not impossible, and they definitely don't have the same need DC did to undergo the reboot. What do you guys think?