5. Good For Marvel's "Majority Shareholder" Characters...
Twelve thousand comic books is a lot of comic books. That's something like 240,000 pages and well over a million panels. It's one heck of a lot... but not as much as you might think. Spider-Man alone has appeared in over one thousand comics with his name in the title (Amazing Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Peter Parker The Spectacular Spider-Man and just plain Spider-Man). The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America, Daredevil, Thor-- one of the reasons these characters have such cachet is that they've had almost unbroken monthly runs since the 1960s, which means they've gotten at least 600 issues apiece. A set of 12,000 issues might still be too small to collect every story they've ever appeared in. The Official Marvel Index, published in 2010, pegged Marvel as producing an average of 1,000 comics a year, or at least 70,000 in all. Marvel may not have even digitized that many, but they exist in some form.
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
