Surpising Sales Numbers

Was looking at sales numbers of comics, and noticed something intresting points

this is from www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales.html by the way

What do we see:

of the top 10 comics varies a bit. If there doing a special Batman or Spiderman book usually its there...but traditionally the top 10 goes...Spiderman, Batman....and

Harley Quinn

of all the female superbooks she is by far the most popular. She typically about 4, ahead of things like Justice Leauge, X-Men, Iron Man, and Superman. She sells very well-in and around 100,000 range. It really is a legitimately popular book.

I could speculate that her kind of protrays her as a fun antihero which makes her Kewl. I noticed a lot online about the LGBT stuff making popular(the book isn't right now about her and the joker, but about her and Poison Ivy owning a hotel)...so...thoughts.

Going down the list For june they recently started a Wonder Woman/Superman rommance book, based on the plotline i am not a fan of..(it takes a bit away from both of there humanity to put them together but who am i to judge} Its debuting at 13. Wonder Woman herself comes at 29, which makes her DCs 11th most popular book not cointing a 4 week event There running with Batman(batman has a lot of books if your curious} and the fourth most popular of there characters after Batman, Harley Quinn Superman, and Green lantern.

Batgirl comes in right after her at 30, which is more popular then Nightwing, Redhood and all the other Batman Rip offs. Catwoman and Batwoman come in at 62 and 63 respectfully which are okay.

Supergirl-104. Yeah it doesn't sell very well.

On the Marvel front-we don't get any where near this. Other then Spiderman and the hulk and couple of outliers most of all there books male and female aren't in the top 50. However the reintroduced Muslim Supergirl Ms. Marvel is at a respectable 61- which you know is okay. Captian Marvel(Carol Danvers) is at 95, but not great. She Hulk does a little better at 90. Black Widdow is at 87, and Electra at 103 which maybe worth mentioning.

The New 52 did a lot to revitalize DCs sales numbers- and though that was a couple of years ago it seems to have worked to a large extent.

But what does this mean? Not sure. if you are going to apply this to movies-well i donno do A Harley Quinn movie. if everyone who bought harley quinn comic bought a 10 dollar movie ticket that would mean maybe 1 million at the box office. Actual comicbooks and movies have incredibly different numbers in terms of sales-but there is a relationship somewhere. And who knows?

(and Archie comics it looks like sell in the 3000 an issue range. Jesus Christ how does that stay in business}

Castor

The Archie numbers aren't exactly accurate. The 3000 is for direct sales to comics stores. Archie has always been a news-stand sales comics, and they do quite well in grocery stores. News-stand sales are typically not reported because of the send-back factor; all copies that aren't sold for the month or whatever sales period are sent back to the publisher. News-stand sales aren't reported in trade publication. The current estimate based on year-end reports from Archie Comics is that Archie sells in the 30-25,000 range for the best sellers and 20-10,000 for the rest. Nor outstanding by some figures, but enough to keep them going, certainly.


P.S. Even considering 100K as doing very well for a book is a big step down from where sales could be. It wasn't too long ago that 1M was the 'good sales' mark, DC and Marvel just kept lowering their expectations and blowing off declining sales numbers as 'kids don't read any more'. However: consider that when 'Death of Captain America' did 200K in sales and Marvel was trumpeting it as a success, that same month 'Disney Comic Adventures', a news-stand only sales book, had 1M copies sold and an estimated readership of 4M. The truth is that the Big 2 do more to hurt their sales with the endless event stunts, reboots, and no longer making all comics accessible for all ages.

Well that makes sense.

But it is intresting.

Say Ironman sells 28,000- so its comprable with archie(though theres probably some newstand, ebooks etc in there to push it up but thats about right).
By themselves that in no way possibly justifys a movie or anything-and its not like Iron Man sold so tremendously well in the 90s. I think the general conscientious is that Iron Man as a comic hasn't been that great since the 80s and 90s(though some people like the X Tremious stuff). But the Iron Man Movies have made Literally billions in the last year by themselves, a billion more from his staring role in the Avenger.

Dr. Strange and Ant-Man are both have movies in development. Neither Have a solo comic book currently. Largely becuse when they do the sales numbers are poor to mediocre.

Now to avoid the "Well Wonder Woman Sells better why doesn't she" arguments that you see a lot on the board.- well its not like 50k is that much better. It makes you realize how little the actual comic industry has to do with comics.

The issue of movies generating money isn't related to comic book sales at all. Comics are being written and made for an increasingly small demographic while the movies are made for as broad an audience as possible. The sales market in comics is falling because the Big 2 go to more and more extreme measures to generate short-term bumps in sales while damaging their long-term viability by pushing away casual fans that are tired of these stunts. As mentioned in the 'Thor is a Chick' thread, over the past few years, you have Peter Parker dying and Doc Ock taking over his body, Avengers vs. X-Men being revealed as the most elaborate dick joke ever conceived (Piotr, Emma, Namor, Illyana, Scott), Johnny Storm 'dying', Fantastic Four being shelved to try and screw up the next Fox FF movie iteration, One More Day, and on and on. They've lost the casual fan market, making the current crop not suitable for children to read and making parents with kids unable to pass a love of comics onto their children. Right now, the Big 2 are only writing comics for the people who would be buying comics regardless of the quality of story.; I've long held a belief that DC could print an issue of Batman that's nothing but a silent 28 pages of Bruce eating breakfast in his Bat-suit, and the monthly sales wouldn't be too far off from what they have now.

Instead, the editors and people in charge of both companies take away the wrong lessons from failure. Sales slipping? It has to be because kids don't read anymore, irregardless of the explosion of popularity of children's and young adult books like Harry Potter, Twilight, Percy Jackson, Divergent, etc. No-body buys our attempts at manga? It must be because manga isn't popular here in America instead of us just copying the art look while disregarding the plot aspects and writing quality that's made manga sections in US bookstores far larger than the shelf-space dedicated to comics. We get a sales bump every time we do an 'event'? All readers must want events where they have to buy every book in our line to keep up rather than we keep loosing readers every time we do this, thus requiring the sales bump in the first place.

Now, let's directly look at the movies and animation series compared to the comics. Well, there is none because the movies and animation are completely written and presented differently than their comics namesakes. Avengers makes a billion+ dollars, cause some folks to go and check out the current Avengers comics...only to find the middle of the Avengers vs. X-Men story that requires them to go sifting through 30+ years of comics history to understand what the hell is going on. Amazing Spider-Man does well at the box office? Sorry, Peter Parker is dead in the comics and replaced by one of his greatest villains. Critically acclaimed and watched animated series like Young Justice? Nope, that doesn't exist in Nu-52; instead, we're giving you a mind-controlled Wonder Girl out to have sex with all her male teammates.

And so on and so forth.

My point is that there's lots of things that Marvel and DC can do to bring sales numbers back to a sustainable high, they just don't want to because the powers that be at the Big 2 don't want to.

Whew....rant off now

We are....kinda a comics website.

I maybe getting this wrong, but i know Fats said we get about 5000 hits a month here(correct me). I am sure the majority is that people hitting the board a lot-but okay. Thats still....maybe a 1000, 2000 discreate people.

28,000 people read iron man these days. Thats about 1/28th. and we are smallish website.

I once saw Comicvine gets about 1 millions hits a month. Theres also Comic Aliance, comicbook resources., and maybe half dozen major comicbook websites-agian cross traffic multiple people.

But yeah.

We live in a world where i would imagine that there's maybe 2 3 million people in this country who would classify themselves as comicbooks fans....but....