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Julie Schwartz long maintained that GREEN LANTERN's first Silver Age issue had no number on the cover because potential readers would "not be interested" in a book that had no "history" behind it.

I do not present myself as a perfect microcosm of the readership, but this was not at all my experience. I paid no attention at all to issue numbers, and distinguished one from another by the cover art! When Green Lantern got is own book, what I saw was an exciting new character, not a lesson in chronology.

Julie was, himself, one of the founding fathers of fandom, going back to the Pulps, and his view of things tended to be skewed by that mindset. It was, as I understand it, his decision to resume the numbering on THE FLASH when Barry Allen's success in SHOWCASE led to getting his own title. Such a decision no doubt generated squeals of delight among hardcore fans (both of them...) but it was meaningless to 99.999% of then-current readers.

Seems to me that there is one reason to number comics; to keep them in numerical order. (If comics ALWAYS put the month and year on the cover, that would work too... but far too many books already published had neither, and I don't recall DC or Marvel ever putting the year on the book solely to show the year of publication - titles not included.)

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Good point... DC only started putting the month/year on their covers when they jumped to 75 cents with the December 1983 issues... I think it took Marvel another 12 years (by a quick scan of FF covers, December 1995) until they started doing the same.

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Sort of. The year in the © changed every 12 months, but NOT every year.

Huh?

Well, remember that the books used to be cover dated four months ahead, for reasons it seemed no one could ever properly explain. That meant a book that hit the stands in May would have an August cover, or somewhere around there. I just checked, and in the case of the X-Men the © notice changed from 1978 to 1979 with the January issue, even tho that issue would have hit the stands around October '78.

Maybe I'm not clear on what you're saying, but Marvel started putting the year of publication on the cover in 1977 and continued at least throughout the '80s.

Here's the first X-Men cover with the date in the box with the X-Men's heads:
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Uncanny X-Men #104, April, with a 1977 copyright date, whihc, even given the advance-dating situation of the time JB cited, places it as the April, 1977 issue. However, if you check Uncanny X-Men #109, it has the month on the cover listed as February... but it still has a 1977 copyright date in the floating-head box. So, it's cover date is still February 1978, regardless of that copyright notice. If someone wasn't aware of the 3-4 month differential between on-sale dates and cover dates, that would get confsuing really fast when it came to most January, February and March coverdated issues of that time.

(Even further muddying the waters were issues that had a coverdate of, let's say, April, but in the indicia were noted as being the March/April issue, and went on sale with other March - not April - issues)

I was referring to when both companies were explicitly marking the month AND year side-by-side on the cover, just as you might normally see on any other newstand publication like a Playboy, Good Housekeeping, etc.