Hi there. Thank you for posting! Happy to answer this and I will try to answer everything you mentioned:
“The CLZ Core database has a real, on-going problem”
First of all, that is a bold statement and a bit over exaggerated. But you’re free to say that or question what we do. To answer that: No we don’t. Publishers don’t make it easy when it comes to putting the issues they released within a certain volume. They’re known to mess this has gone wrong in the past and such is the case for Dynamite.
When publisher switches a title, we switch it over to a new volume. Unless the title difference is very minimal (X-Men > Uncanny X-Men). You have to understand that we do this to make it easier for you to find something. This is the most logical thing to do. With Vampirella/Dracula: Rage, they saw the opportunity to do an issue 666. Cool and all but this messes up their volume numbering. Which we hoped would they would reflect on in the indicia and in the indicia for future releases. As you can see by what you’re showing, they did not.
“Volumes should DEFINITELY correspond with the publisher’s numbering”
No, DEFINITELY not. We try to reflect what have, it’s just not always possible. But by that logic should all of the first 3 deadpool titles fall under the same volume? That would be a real mess if you ask me:
- Deadpool: The Circle Chase #1:
- Deadpool, Vol. 1
-Deadpool, Vol. 2
“I know that you have a history of just making up your own variant numbers, which is bad enough”
What do you mean by that? Variant letters? We don’t make them up. We give them a letter based on how the barcode counts upwards. This was done by the bigger publishers in the past which some have moved away from over the years for some reason. Giving a cover a variant letter isn’t done consistently by the publishers. So by doing it like this, it is a way to make a database consistent. A few publishers (Dynamite) like to use variant letters for their covers. We do apply these to entries we get in.
“This is only an example as I have this same problem with about 50% of the multiple-volume comics that I collect (like the X-Men is a real problem).”
Could you let us know what you are referring to? I’d be happy to look into it 
“Other than a complete rebuild of the database, what can be the correction here?”
What for? Don’t you this this is an exaggerated solution to a non existing problem created because of an error by the publisher?
Hope you can understand as to why we do what we do. Like I mentioned, they’re not making it easy for us. But we try to do our best with what we can 
