Amelia Cole and the Great Renumbering: Adam P. Knave Explains The Decision

It’s not that infrequent that comic book series renumber; often it’s truncating a long run to take advantage of the upside of a new #1 in a crowded marketplace full of titles with long, impenetrable backstories. Once in a great while, it’s returning to the higher number you abandoned after the low numbers get high enough that they’re no longer attractive to new readers.In the case of Amelia Cole, though, it’s something else entirely.The Monkeybrain title, launched last year as a series of miniseries, ran for six issues as Amelia Cole and the Unknown World before rebranding last month as Amelia Cole and the Hidden War. The creators–writers Adam P. Knave, D.j. Kirkbride and artist Nick Brokenshire–“It’s a pulp fiction staple; the Indiana Jones movies use them, the Harry Potter books use them,” Knave said. “And there are other comics, like Hellboy and Locke & Key. So it wasn’t uncharted territory but when we started the book back before Monkeybrain, we hadn’t really given much thought to ComiXology. When we started with ComiXology, we had a discussion and decided to just go forward as limited series.”That comes with complications, though; ComiXology isn’t set up to automatically detect what miniseries comes next (they’re technically different products altogether, after all), so their popular “keep reading” feature that pops up at the end of books won’t come when you finish one miniseries, even if the next one is readily available. However, it works perfectly with ongoing series.