John Mayo has his August, 2007 Sales Analysis up at CBR, with all kinds of charts and graphs and some changes based on the ngoing online conversation about the veracity (or lack of same) about these charts:
Things do seem to be going well for Marvel these days and perhaps something can be learned from what is working for them. Marvel has been doing exceptionally well recently with events like “Civil War” and now “World War Hulk.” Both of the events had very easily explained plots which were equally easy to sell potential readers on. Meanwhile, DC had “52” which they sold as “a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman” which was enough to turn off many causal fans. While the series sold very well, particularly for a weekly series, it wasn’t the major blockbuster that “Civil War” was. In addition, most Marvel titles saw a noticeable sales bump from both “Civil War” and “World War Hulk” while “52” provided no such sales bumps due to it being a self-contained series. And the current “Countdown” series seems to lack that sort of solid sales pitch other than it counts down to something, apparently another “Crisis.”
The Hulking World War of Infinite Civil War Countdown Crisis Continues. Collect all 1200 tie-ins and variants.
If they were very clever, they would tie the crossover storyline so that obscure BACK ISSUES were involved! The Publisher sells their reprint issues, retailers markup their back issues! Maybe they could pull an Asimov, and tiein ALL of the various crossovers retroactively! Doesn’t each series try to create and spin off a new character? Use those as the Six Degrees, and run with it! You could even kill them off, one per issue! Variants would be different artists, various cover treatments (like glitter ink! scratch and sniff! scratch off lottery tickets!), prices, uncut sheets from the printer… sorry, gotta find a mylar snug to breathe into…
Is success only measured by how well each issue sells? Fifty two issues of a comic that sells around 100,000 – 90,000 copies is pretty huge ($13M) compared to something like Civil War selling around 200,000 copies but only seven issues long (4.2M).
52 was almost four and a half years worth of regular comic selling really well. They had to have made tons of cash on that.
I’d agree 52 was in fact a huge hit. Although CW probably brought in just as much money after you add in Frontline and all the tie-in books.
Yeah there were a sick amount of tie-ins, I wonder if it put them over 52 comics overall?
“Yeah there were a sick amount of tie-ins, I wonder if it put them over 52 comics overall?”
Yes it does. If you count all the tie-ins from the various ongoings, it’s in the neighborhood of 100.