Bleeding Cool is reporting that plans are afoot for Amazing Spider-Man to go twice monthly, with Dan Slott as the continuing writer. Marvel has not confirmed – but neither has it denied. Which begs the question: if it is going to happen, what, exactly, made them reconsider?

It probably isn’t scheduling problems. Since the title went to a thrice-monthly schedule with issue #546, the book has shipped more consistently than almost any other Marvel title – probably because of the larger-than-average lead time it requires. In almost a hundred issues since the new schedule began, the only major scheduling blips I can recall have been one month where only two books were solicited, and this month, when issue #633 slipped so far back that it came out the same week as #634 (although lord only knows why #634 couldn’t be shunted back to accommodate.) That’s actually pretty good going for a series, whether you judge it by months or issues.

Many will place the blame on sales. However, it seems as though sales of the Amazing have actually remained within reasonable parameters. Admittedly, according to the (reportedly inaccurate – but consistently so) ICv2 numbers, the book is selling around 53k, which is down around a fifth on the combined sales of three monthly spider-titles – but then, the rest of the industry is down too – often far more than Amazing Spider-Man is. Over on his Formspring page, Tom Brevoort recently pointed out that regardless of sales numbers, the book sits fairly comfortably in the Top 10/15 sellers, and that by that metric it’s undeniably doing well compared to the rest of the industry.

Furthermore, the question must be asked: how will releasing one fewer book a month raise overall sales? Perhaps the logic is that it’ll revitalise the market for Spider-Man spin-offs, which has utterly collapsed since the schedule revisions began. The “Amazing Spider-Man Presents” minis sell poorly, while the monthly anthology has been through several titles and formats and seen sales plummet month on month ending in yet another cancellation. Perhaps the logic is that a single writer and less frequent release schedule will draw in some of the buyers that have left the series of late.

Either way, to simply break even, Spider-Man would needs to gain roughly 50,000 additional sales per month – so either 25,000 per issue, or a new companion series selling 50,000+ copies. Slott is a popular writer, but it’s debatable whether he has the name power to raise sales on a book by 50% (though paired with a big-name artist, he might). On the other hand, a second ongoing spider-book would face the same kind of problems that have dogged recent Spider-Man spin-offs – indeed, Marvel themselves played up the fact that Amazing is the “core” Spider-Man book. They’d quite probably have to undo their own marketing to make a second ongoing work.

One alternative is that the book is going to make a permanent change to $3.99, and Marvel feel that the book’s popularity would dip too far if readers were asked to essentially pay an additional issue’s cost per month. Personally, I’ve dropped many $3.99 books for being too expensive, and that’s when they come out once a month – there’s no way I’d stick with thrice-monthly Spider-Man at that price. Amazing has been fairly good at keeping the price down, only raising it with an associated increase in pagecount – but even with backup material, I know I’d find it difficult to spend so much money on one series per month. Maybe Marvel’s hope is that 2 books at $3.99 will retain/gain enough readers to bring in more money than 3 books at $3.99 would.

Whatever the logic, one hopes that this change isn’t being made for creative reasons. Amazing Spider-Man has been one of the most consistently excellent series Marvel has put out over the last few years. The sheer variety of writers and artists means that it’s a virtual buffet of excellent talent. Admittedly, it isn’t always brilliant, but with shorter arcs and frequent single-issue stories means that you’re never stuck with a bad creator for long. Indeed, Amazing Spider-Man has been so good that it won our best ongoing 2008 award, and would probably have had the best ongoing of 2009 award if we had been forced to give one.

At this point, there’s no way of telling whether Marvel actually will make this change – but it’s difficult to see that it would be a positive one if they did. And one thing’s for certain – it’ll mean that those who disliked the post-One More Day status quo will treat it as a victory for their cause – and frankly, anything that encourages them must be by default a bad idea!