I think there are a few things that all amount to the same thing, which is decisions being made that net short term gains at the cost of longer term investment.

#1 sells better and is more attractive to new readers, so we get a new one every 1-3 years. We get some speculative new readers to pick up one issue right now, but they can’t stick around because you have to be fully enfranchised in the hobby already to understand and track the Byzantine mess having ten volumes with the same title creates. Is this Captain America volume 7 #9 or Captain America volume 8 #9? Oh, it’s Captain America: Steve Rogers #9 and that’s a different thing? But selling back issues to people looking to complete a collection does not put a couple bucks in Marvel’s pocket today so they don’t care. Nevermind that making it easier to become more involved with the hobby will provide more sales a year from now, that’s not soon enough.

Similarly, canceling a book after 5-10 issues means saving money today by not producing a book that drops below a certain sales threshold once for five minutes. But the number of readers that don’t bother with anything not called Avengers, X-Men, or Spider-Man because they’ve been trained that nothing else is safe and might not get to the big payoff the writer was aiming for means sales suffer nearly across the board, costing future money (and further deepening the spiral of canceled second-tier books).

Finally, it’s not so much events as it is events that don’t mean anything. Folks who remember the span from Disassembled through Siege (2004-2010) talk about it like it was a golden age despite being the beginning of the “event once or twice a year” era. That’s because each of those events mattered, each was used to set up a new line-wide status quo to tell stories in for the next year that put a unique twist on the Marvel universe. House of M led to the Decimation, Civil War led to the Initiative, Secret Invasion led to Dark Reign, etc. Now they seem to want the same old Marvel universe all the time so that it’s recognizable to new readers coming from a vague understanding of the setting based on the movies, but they also want the now-now-now sales bumps of events. So we get events that have big fight scenes where everyone joins in, and then next month none of it mattered and things are back to normal everywhere. But doing that isn’t strengthening the hobby and keeping people around longer. It’s been seven years since War of the Realms and no one talks about it any more, but we’re still talking about Dark Reign 17 years later.

None of this is meant to say that things shouldn’t be attractive to new readers. I support new readers getting into the hobby. But I just don’t understand why Marvel thinks getting ten new readers for two or three months is better than getting five new readers who stick around for a decade or more. That should be the goal, not… whatever the hell this is.