Over the holiday I spotted something pretty eye-popping on Tumblr—this comics sales chart from Amazing Heroes #49, published in 1984 and posted by Sam Humphries.
Your jaw will drop in amazement to see a world where American Flagg!, a daring SF comic by Howard Chaykin outsold Captain America, and Groo outsold Batman, Detective and Green Lantern.
It’s also a fairly dizzying array of genres, with Conan, Alien Legion, Dreadstar, Nexus, Aztec Ace and Evangeline in the top 100.
What the hell kind of bizarro world was this? Well as Comichron sales historian John Jackson Miller tweeted, it was Capital Distribution’s world:
@Comixace This was picked up from Capital's Internal Correspondence; these are order index numbers with each. Also note…
— John Jackson Miller (@jjmfaraway) November 29, 2014
@Comixace …that since Capital was getting worse terms from DC in its early days, its indie sales were more relative to it.
— John Jackson Miller (@jjmfaraway) November 29, 2014
…thus it’s not indicative of the entire comics sales world. MIller’s own archives only go back to the 90s, so we don’t have the exact info to compare with Diamond.
It’s still a pretty eye opening chart however. Indie comics routinely sold 50,000 copies, even ones forgotten today, and while the 80s may not have had the artistic wonderland and individual expression we have today, superheroes had far less of a stranglehold than they would have in the 90s. Of course that stranglehold was partly the result of the demise of Capital City Distribution, which had a more indie-centric focus. If Capital hadn’t been done in by the distribution wars of the 90s—leading to its acquisition by Diamond in 1996—we might have had a very different development of comics.
That said, I like where we are now.
While we’re on the topic of comics in the 1980s, here is a forgotten factoid: Marvel and DC single issues were significantly cheaper than the vast majority of indie comics. So much so that it was accepted as fact that pricepoint was one of the key barriers to sales for independent publishers.
Now look at 2014: the cover prices for Marvel and DC are on a par with (or in some cases higher than) many independent publishers’ single issues.
Well, I take it back. At a glance I thought it was the Cap City chart — but looking now at the Feb. 1984 Internal Correspondence, it’s different in several regards — and does not yet have the Order Index Numbers listed. So this would be AH’s own research, which I seem to recall editor Dave Olbrich saying was generated from retailer reports. (But I could be remembering that wrong…)
But Capital City’s Top 300 does share many things in common, and has the aforementioned Marvel/DC split. The AH list contains things not on the Capital list, like RONIN — there was never a perfect matchup between the distributor charts and release date-based lists in those days. I scanned the Cap City chart here: https://twitter.com/comichron/status/539496344151674880
What’s most amusing about this chart is the reminder of how, before Miller and Moore made their contributions to DC’s canon, Marvel was just BUTCHERING their main competition, DC. Only one regular DC title in the Top 20, and Miller’s Ronin limited series.
Okay, I have located Dave’s note to me about them, from many years ago: “We had a group of retailers who would regularly send us information about their sales … back in the stone age when there was nearly no information at all.” I had forgotten about that — apologies.
It is then in the same ballpark, data-wise, with the Market Beat numbers we ran from our retail surveys for years in COMICS & GAMES RETAILER, starting in 1994. I spent umpteen hours on them and the results were pretty good in the years when the response was heavy — we had close to a hundred shops reporting at the peak. But since we weren’t getting the same shops every month and they weren’t reporting on every title, it wasn’t as reliable as it might have been. It’s one more resource which may or may not wind up on Comichron as I get time…
” … and while the 80s may not have had the artistic wonderland and individual expression we have today …”
I found this to be the most ridiculous claim I’ve read in a while. You look at the sheer diversity of books on that list and it’s clear how much of a wasteland today’s market is. .
On the diversity score, I would note that you’re looking at almost every comic book that came out in February 1984 on that list above. In terms of number of releases, that period — right when the other newsstand-focused publishers are dying and just before the black-and-white boom — saw incredibly light release slates from the major publishers. It’s easy for independent books to make the Top 100 when there’s only 130 or so comics coming out overall, and when almost all the main Marvel titles are accounted for by the time you hit 50th place.
By contrast, February 2014 — a light release month for these days — had 443 different new comics coming out, less than 35% of them from Marvel and DC. No, the Top 100 doesn’t look as diverse — Marvel and DC took 88 out of the Top 100 slots — but that’s because they’re publishing so much more. Combined, though, their market shares are much less than they were then, so it’s not just that offerings are spread across more publishers now: sales are, too.
Blake — You’re missing Titans and Vigilante. 3 out of 20 is better. A bit.
-B
As a fun data point, I have from Dave Sim that CEREBUS #59 (70th on the above list) had a total print run of 20,000 copies. And yet Cerebus is up there outselling SUPERMAN #396 on the Amazing Heroes list in a year when postal statements put Superman at around 110-115,000 copies a month, newsstand included.
The reason is that the Direct Market — or sample groups of it like the AH reporting stores — simply wasn’t yet reflective of the overall picture for the mainstream publishers and books that were still mainly newsstand plays. The earliest Superman issue for which I have Capital City’s internal data shows the distributor sold 4,600 copies of #407 — which was still only about 5% of the overall sales, including newsstand. At those levels, yeah, we can believe that Cerebus was competitive with Superman — just only in the comic shops, and only until the major publishers turned more of their attention toward the Direct Market.
Looking at that chart… Supergirl #20 outsold both Action Comics #556 AND Superman #396.
Whoa!
It was a Titans/JLA crossover, which I’m guessing gave it a boost on AH’s sales-by-retailers list.
(Not that Supergirl couldn’t have been more popular than those other books — but DC did cancel it three months later, even though a movie was due out that summer.)
“Average number of copies per store”.
Okay… it’s weighted a little, since these are stores which were able to report their order numbers, and thus a bit more organized than some. (In 1984, cash registers were high tech.)
I started collecting a few months after this list (Amazing Spider-Man #254).
Note that Ka-Zar, Moon Knight, and Micronauts were Direct Market-only titles.
Knowing the general number of stores now… how does the Top 300 compare, when averaged by store?
Well, you’d figure today a 100,000 copy seller would be doing between 35 and 40 copies per store. But it is greatly skewed because the median store is quite a bit different from the average store. I would think it would be even more the case in 1984. We know the number of copies a lot of these titles sold to the Direct Market, and these reported averages are so high that the only way they work is if there were a lot of stores ordering very small quantities. And that was probably the case: for every store on Amazing Heroes’ radar screen, there were several shops just dabbling or just getting started.
If that’s a “fairly dizzying array of genres” I’m a fairly bewildered pseudo-dragon with a +2 sword.
“You look at the sheer diversity of books on that list and it’s clear how much of a wasteland today’s market is.”
Huh? What do you consider “today’s market”? If you just look at comics shops, or the top-selling titles, you don’t see much but superheroes, but digital delivery adds a whole lotta diversity, and the web blows it away.