I agree, although my first comic was Amazing Spider-Man 124, a two-parter with a great cliffhanger ending, that was the rarity in those bygone days. Most of the comics I grew up reading were one and done, and I think they were all the better for it. It's amazing how writers used to be able to tell a whole story, wherein so much seemed to happen, in a single issue. Now it takes 6 issues and I sometimes have a hard time determining if anything at all happened in the end.

I do think the companies are trying to cater to TPB audiences who don't want to read a story that starts in one $15 book and ends in another. And their easiest solution is to just publish a series of 6 issue stories so they don't have to worry about where the numbering falls in their TPB publishing schedule. I don't know if there is a solution to this trend, but I would be interested to see TPB sales figures compared to individual issue sales for the same series. For instance, the first 6 issues of JLI (not every issue sold equally) compared to sales of the new JLI trade that collects those same issues. The question being, do the TPB sales warrant the six issue story trend that seems to be alienating individual issue buyers?

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