Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-29112684-20160717152304/@comment-4651179-20160717182804

To expand on what SunGodKizaru explained, it's a business model.

Readers nowadays are different from before. Back then, people didn't seem to care much for how long a series had been going on. But current potential new readers appear to be intimidated by comic series with high number of issues. The numbering no longer represents how many issues have been published of a comic, but instead how many issues the new reader has missed.

The following is Peter David's comments on renumbering, I think it's an interesting little read, specially considering he works in the comic medium and has worked for a long time (taken from here):

I’ve noticed fans lately commenting on the fact that Marvel is routinely renumbering and relaunching series. Some fans see this as a relentless marketing gimmick while others seem to understand the need for doing so: to attract new readers.

If it were up to me–if I were running Marvel–I would do away with numbering entirely.

There’s no point to it anymore.

It’s not like in the days where I was first buying comics, where I could cheerfully buy “Action Comics” or “Detective Comics” and not feel compelled to obtain the previous several hundred issues worth of books. Nowadays the longer a book goes, the more the numbering serves as a disincentive. If a book gets up even to the twenties or thirties, new fans won’t be bothered to pick it up because they don’t want to invest in the considerable capital required to purchase the previous books; and no one wants to come into a story that is already underway, no matter how much Marvel might be putting summaries on the title page. So the numbering discourages new readers from coming aboard while simultaneously you’ll lose readers through attrition, if nothing else.

As far as I’m concerned, numbering has outlived its usefulness. When was the last time anyone gave a damn which issue number “Time” or “Entertainment Weekly” was up to? I would simply put the month and year on the cover for reference and be done with it. This is the July 2016 issue of “Spider-Man 2099.” What more do you need to put it in the correct order in your longbox?

If Marvel just does away with numbering, yes, they’ll lose the advantage of relaunching with a new number one. But the more number ones they produce, the more they make people tired of the obvious promotion. On the upside, they’ll stop losing potential new readers, so to my mind, that’s a wash.