Field note ·
What we count as an Avengers origin issue
Not every first appearance is an origin. Here is how the Wentworth ledger decides which sequential stories enter a collectible drop.
Collectors write to us asking whether a splash of the team standing on a rooftop counts as an origin issue. It does not. An origin issue, on our ledger, is the sequential story in which the ensemble is assembled for a stated reason, on a stated day, with a recap box that names who was missing before that hour.
A first cameo in another title is a cameo. A later anniversary retelling is a retelling. We will still talk about both in a consultation, but we will not allocate them as origin-issue NFT comics. The drop has to give you the pages where the team becomes a team.
That rule keeps edition numbers honest. If we treated every variant cover as an origin, the ledger would fill with covers and empty interiors. The NFT comic we mint is the whole issue: splash, recap, interiors, and the closing page that shows the roster as it stands when the story ends.
When a brief arrives for a founder joining after the first assembly, we file it as a joining origin, not as a reprint of the first assembly. Those two issues sit next to each other on the shelf in Wentworth. They do not share an edition.