Marvel and DC sales figures

A brief history of comic sales

Some of the other reasons (beside story) why comics sold... or didn't.

World War II: the golden age

Our story begins in the early 1940s where some individual comics sold by the million. If memory serves, Superman's top sales were 1.6 million copies an issue, but the original Captain Marvel hit the record at 2 million. Note that these were not specially hyped issues. In the 1990s Marvel managed to sell 1 million copies of one issue of one comic, but only by extreme hype (and collectors buying multiple copies). Sales in WWII were genuinely high without the need for hype. After the war the stories became more bland and sales decreased. So fast forward to...

1955-1957: restricted distribution

At the start of 1957, Marvel (then called Atlas) was the biggest comics publisher in America and published 75 comics a month, with 5 stories per comic. But as a result of the campaign against comic violence by Fredric Wertham, comics got very bad press. Many retailers and distributors stopped taking comics. Many comics stopped publication. Atlas (Marvel) lost its distributor and one month produced no comics at all. To survive, Marvel had to take a very restrictive contract with National Periodicals, DC's parent company. Marvel was only allowed to sell eight titles a month. Writers and artists were fired. For a few months they just used up the work that should have gone into the 75 previous titles.

1958-1960: they try something new

In 1958 Jack Kirby came knocking on Marvel's door. Depending on which version you believe, either this was coincidence, or it was Kirby who persuaded Stan Lee to go to publisher Martin Goodman with ideas for new comics. They experimented with various ideas but nothing took fire. In 1960, DC published the Justice League and it sold well. Goodman suggested that Marvel do a superhero team, and Lee's wife suggested that he put the same effort into it that he put into his other projects (TV scripts etc.). The Fantastic Four began in 1961 and the rest is history!

1961-1968: Marvel's sales soar

Marvels' books sold more and more each month. Eventually the Marvel style was copied by DC and their sales improved as well, but not as much as Marvel's. Marvel still had to distribute through National until 1968 when Marvel was sold to another company (that later becomes Cadence Industries). In 1969 this company bought its own distributor, so Marvel could publish as many titles as they wished. Around this time the extra titles (and continuing strength of the other titles) allowed Marvel to overtake DC in sales numbers, and they have remained higher ever since.

1968-1971: enter Marvel Time

The increase in sales led to two decisions that, in my opinion, killed the goose that laid the golden egg. First, Marvel was able to publish more titles. More titles means less tight continuity between each title, it meant fewer readers would buy the whole range (and so feel less invested in the titles), it means less pressure to make each issue an event, and it meant creative talent was spread thinner. (Some, like Jack Kirby, left Marvel at this time). Second, they invented Marvel Time as a way to keep the same heroes around for longer. Change ended. The fans noticed.

1968-1971: sales flatten and start to decline

"Comics had always been a cyclical business, and almost everybody in 1971 thought that super heroes must inevitably be on their way out again. That's why there was such a gold rush on to find the next big genre--sword-and-sorcery looked like it might be a contender, and there were a lot of new mystery (watered-down horror comics without much horror), war and western comics being churned out in this period. But the classic Marvel, Stan's Marvel, was still seen as something of a fad (even by Stan himself), and the common wisdom was that everybody was going to be doing something else very soon (possibly in another field entirely.)" - Tom Brevoort

The early 1970s: sales go down

"Newsstand sales were dropping precipitously in the early 1970's in the face of alternative forms of entertainment (especially television), and fewer and fewer retail outlets were even bothering to install a spin rack. [the industry seemed to be] on the edge of disappearing forever" [1] The comics companies were in trouble. "That was the period when comics seemed to increase in price every year, with the price quickly escalating from 12 cents, to 25 cents, in just four years." [2] Even at 25 cents, distributors only got 5 cents per issue, and most issues had to be returned, so when sales went down the retailers were happy to stop selling them and make space for more profitable magazines. Note that the absolute figures did not decline so much, but when margins are tight and newsstands make more money using the space for other magazines, then a ten or twenty percent decline is deadly. Also during this period "Marvel captured a significant piece of DC's market share by offering a lower-priced product with a higher distributor discount." (Wikipedia)

The late 1970s: sales go down even further

"The late-1970's nearly saw the demise of comics publishing. The precipitous drops in newsstand sales that I mentioned earlier in this series more than offset the ability of Seagate Distributing to grow comics sales by shipping comics directly to comics shops. While the Direct Market comics shops did manage to transfer a great number of fans to themselves that otherwise had been purchasing through newsstand outlets, the harsh reality was that newsstand sales were dropping far faster than the Direct Market was growing. ... DC Comics, without warning, suddenly slashed over 30% of their entire line in a single day (the infamous DC Implosion...). ... [and regarding Marvel there was a] marked predisposition on the part of Mr. Feinberg to simply shut the whole thing down." [3]

1977 and 1979: turning points for Marvel

Due to a continuing decline in sales, pressure from parent companies, and a new lawsuit affecting distributors, Marvel was in crisis. However, in 1977 Jim Shooter had started to turn the place around so that books came out on time and with quality stories. Chuck Rozanski wrote a letter suggesting better credit terms for comic shops, Shooter understood comic shops, and so Marvel decided to deal with them directly under attractive terms. In 1979 the Direct Market accounted for 6% of Marvel's gross sales. In 1982 it was 20%. In 1985 it was 50%. In 1987 it was 70% of Marvel's gross sales. DC followed suit. As speciality shops grew there was space for new titles, and independent comic publishers sprang up. "It wasn't until the 1980s, and the real advent of the direct market as a legitimate means of distribution that most people began to think that the business as a whole might still have a future." - Tom Brevoort

1979-1993: Jim Shooter + investor speculation = rising sales

Rising sales are partly due to Jim Shooter's time at Marvel, which produced some classic stories. And partly because people started to make serious money from back issues, so the number of comic shops soared as everyone thought they could make a good living from their hobby. Also at this time both Marvel and DC had policies in place that led to a smaller and smaller number of distributors controlling all comic sales.

1993-1999: the bubble burst

A combination of too many new comic shops (a classic investment bubble) and a series of bad decisions at Marvel (such as great increases in cover price and number of titles) all started to fall apart in 2003. The last straw was DC's Death Of Superman in 1992. Fans invested in the last issues expecting high returns, only to find it was all just a trick. Collectors lost interest. Marvel tried more gimmicks and price rises to maintain their income, and bought the distributor Heroes World and stopped selling through others, hoping to force the industry to play by its rules. Marvel was bankrupt in 1996 (they filed in January 1997), but was able to continue trading under new terms. The move to specialist shops had saved the industry for a few years, but long term it threatened disaster. Only existing comic buyers go into comic shops, so there are no new readers. In 1979 a typical comic sold 100,000 copies, and much more ten years earlier. But today, 20,000 is common, and comics only survive because they make extra sales in trade paperback compilations.

"Sales of comics had dwindled steadily since 1993, the most profitable year in comicdom's history: According to the January 18 [2002] issue of Comics Buyer Guide, the industry's key trade publication, sales fell off 14 percent in 1998 and 5 percent in 1999 and 2000. A billion-dollar biz in 1993 was, by 2000, pulling down less than half that." (source)

Since the 1980s: merchandising is everything

To understand Marvel comics' sales since the 1980s, you need to know three things.

First, the movies. Marvel makes much more money from movies than from comics. Some years ago they sold the movie rights to their characters (generally agreed to be a bad decision), but the rights reverted back to Marvel in the late 1990s, leading to the big movies (mainly the Spiderman and X-Men franchise).

Second, the trading cards. Marvel is now owned by "Toy Biz" and to the business people who run Marvel, the toys and trading cards are just as important as the comics. Part of the reason for Marvel's bankruptcy in 1996 was that they bought two big trading card companies, then the baseball players went on strike and the fashion for trading cards declined.

Third and finally, corporate raider Ron Perelman bought Marvel in 1989 and then made a series of disastrous decisions that, according to most commentators, directly led to the company's bankruptcy. "Mega-investor Ron Perelman has all the traits of a comic book super villain. He's massively wealthy and powerful More to the point, he exudes enough vanity and overreach to make Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom seem like a couple of Girl Scouts." [source] Marvel is now in the hands of people who know a little more about comics and, thanks also to money from the movies, is in an improving position financially.

2000-2006: slow improvement due to trade paperback sales

2000 saw the worst sales figures. Since then sales have slowly improved (only slowly) because Marvel has had success with selling trade paperbacks. Trades typically collecting six issues of the monthly comics. Now comics are written in six issue blocks with the trade paperback in mind. Many commentators believe that monthly comics are effectively dead, except as source material for trade paperbacks. The trades and comics together only exist in order to provide source material for the far more profitable movies and merchandising. It should also be said that the quality of writing and art has improved. In the 1990s a lot of top name writers and artists left to create independent comic companies. Part of the revival in sales is due to bringing them back. Personally I think a lot more could be done, but credit where credit is due.

Sales and profitability are not the same

John Jackson Miller knows a thing or two about sales, and made some interesting observations on a recent comic price guide thread. This is just a “fair use” summary, with my comments:

The comic book with the largest print run of all time was 1991’s X-Men Vol. 2, #1, with 7.1 million copies across five variant covers. This was a good quality book, but was also the greatest example of hype at the most hyped period of an investment bubble. The investment bubble peaked and burst in 1993. More comics were sold in 1993 than in any single year of the Golden Age.

The highest selling single comic in most years is now in the 300,000s. In 2003 Superman The Wedding Album had 346,000 pre-orders, and around the same time the “Heroes Reborn” Fantastic Four first issue had preorders of 314,000.

By the end of 2005, comics in the USA were grossing around $30 million per month. This is for the top twenty publishers handled by Diamond (which has an effective monopoly), and includes a few publications that are arguably not comics, but overall the figure is taken to be a reliable ballpark. The number was increasing by three percent per year.

Typical sales figures in 1968 (the height of the silver age) were 200,000 copies per issue. Typical sales for a hit book today are around a third of that. But they make around the same money, even after inflation, due to higher cover prices and reissuing through trades. Licensing can make them even more lucrative.

Recent years have had more than double the number of releases seen in 1968. But perhaps the best news is that comic professionals are now paid more (usually), and of course the comics are printed on better quality paper.

How to sell more comics
(apart from by improving the stories)

I am not an expert at comic sales, but I know of a man who is. The ideas on this page come from "Tales from the database" by Chuck Rozanski at Mile High comics. Chuck Rozanski probably knows more about selling comics than anyone else in the world.

Aggressively seek new customers

"The risk that I see the mainstream comics publishers taking right now is that they are not working aggressively to build a new audience for comics. They are sitting on their hands, while watching unit sales of mainstream comics steadily decline. Their only real answer to this problem has been to continually offset their unit sales declines by repeatedly raising cover prices. This is a strategy of doom for comics as we've known them for the past 70 years." - Chuck Rozanski

Don't charge too much!

The core of the comics business is the loyal fans who buy the whole line of comics (or at least a large percentage). When prices rise too fast they stop buying everything. And of course new readers are less likely to start up. The readers in the middle (the ones who maybe subscribe to two or three books) will keep reading, but when you hit the core readers and the new readers you soon have serious problems. In 1986, the comics cost 65c. By 1989 they were $1.00 By 1996 they were $2.00 Today they are around $3.25 That is a huge price increase!

Previews

Publishers need to make it as easy as possible for retailers (and readers!) people to "try before you buy." (This comment was made in 2001 and the Internet has improved things since then, but anything that makes it even easier is a good thing.)

Make web sites fast, easy and pleasurable

Many comic web sites seem afraid of giving too much away. And even worse, some plaster their material with ads. That drives people away. The goal should be to get as many people to see as much as possible. A percentage of those who see the sample will then buy the full product, and the numbers can be very large indeed.

"Sell comics, not ads! Make the experience of reading sample comics online as fast, easy, and pleasurable as possible. Anything that interferes with that core goal [such as ads on the site] should be eliminated. ... Our experience has been that the more information provided to fans about their favorite creators, titles, and characters the greater their propensity to purchase upcoming items. Sheesh, this isn't rocket science..."

( That was written back in 2002 or 2003 I think. So I visited Marvel.com to see if anything had improved. I wanted to be able to click on a book like at Amazon's home page. Instead I was faced with two very large animated banner ads for Superman on DVD! Superman is not even a Marvel brand! Marvel treats its home page like some free amateur web space that has to be paid for with ads from other people. It was all very depressing. Comic fans often talk about how the newsstands no longer stock comics, and this stops new readers from discovering comics. But Amazon has shown that the web can be a virtual newsstand, but much more profitable. It depresses me to see that Marvel has not caught on after all these years. the DC web site is better, because comics are more prominent and the ads are smaller, but they need to be like Amazon or eBay or the other really successful sites: stop advertising others' stuff, and make a virtual store front where it is easy to browse a variety of wares. )

Get Google to work for you

The comic companies have some very high profile brands. These should be driving people to the company web sites and thus to buying comics. But instead when you Google a superhero's name, the publisher's site is usually not even in the top ten!

Don't publish too many titles

I love the Marvel universe. I would love to buy them all. A lot of fans feel like I do, and it used to be possible for most fans to do this. But when prices rise AND the number of titles rises this becomes impossible. Between 1986 and 1993, the cost of buying Marvel's complete line of comics rose from $24 to $150 per month. The few who could afford to buy them did not have the time to read them. Collectors no longer bought comics on impulse (they didn't have the time or money). Substantial numbers of hard core collectors simply stopped collecting comics. The investment bubble burst.

Don't trick the fans

The 1990s saw a number of tricks that really annoyed the fans. Small things like endless novelty covers or renumbering at number 1, and big lies like "the death of Superman" where he never really died. People get tired of too many gimmicks, and if you lie to them then they won't trust you. People are more likely to stop buying if they don't trust you.

Produce a reliable and interesting product

Delayed, disappointing or dull products mean readers buy fewer comics.

Work on getting comics accepted as helping kids to read

Schools and libraries may be the equivalent of yesterday's newsstand, as a way to introduce new readers. Of course you then need to direct them to the web or the shops to actually pay for the next copy :) Don't try to make money of this, see it as promotion (and of course a way to get kids to read).

Crossgen had an excellent school-oriented reading pack that was cheaper than the alternatives and was making it way into many schools. (Unfortunately the company had completely unrelated problems that drove it bankrupt, but the schools idea was a good one.)

Don't over-print (for the direct market)

Reducing the availability of back issues (by not printing too many) makes them more valuable. If there are more comics than people want then the price falls to almost zero. So a little shortage helps keep prices higher and this keeps comics retailers in business. Without the retailers there is no comics industry! This also increases the value of private collections. That means you and me: ordinary comic readers find that their own comics are worth more, and this encourages them to buy more. In 2001, Marvel started to pursue this policy aggressively, only printing books that were pre-ordered, and not reprinting. This was very unpopular with retailers, but popular with back issue sellers. The retailers risk can be reduced by making better previews and less empty hype, so everyone knows how many to realistically order.

Make it easy to open a comic shop.

In 1979, due to increased print costs, sales were declining in regular news vendors. But there were only about 800 comics shops in the whole world. Marvel (encouraged by Rozanski) made it cheaper to open a comic shop, and the numbers increased dramatically. For about ten years comic sales were better, and by 1993 the number peaked at 10,000 comic shops.

...but be careful where new comic shops are located.

When a small new shop opens near an big old shop, the small shop tries to sell everything cheaper, in order to get customers. But most new shops (of any kind, not just comics) lack experience and only a few survive. Not only does the small shop go bust, but often the big shop does as well because it has lost volume and has had to cut the prices of what is left. As a result both shops close, which helps nobody. This was a great problem in the early 1990s when, helped by other disastrous policies, over 4,000 of these shops went bust by the time Marvel went bankrupt in 1996.

Avoid creating a monopoly

This is just common sense business advice. When you have a monopoly then you become inefficient, some of your customers have extra costs (and might go bust) and others avoid you. That is what happened when Marvel bought Heroes World distributors and used them exclusively. And when DC then made agreements with another company, Diamond, that prevented others from distributing their products. Chuck Rozanski explains at length in his columns why this was a bad move for the industry. He concludes:

"Frankly, after having spent my entire adult life working to promote comics as a viable popular culture art form, I now see us as being in an end game. It is no longer a question to me of whether the comics market as we know it is going to implode, but rather one of when this dreadful event is going to transpire. The one ray of optimism that I have managed to retain is that perhaps the day will come when those who have the power to save the Direct Market may wake up, and finally realize that the self-serving structural constraints that they have built into the current comics distribution system are strangling the Golden Goose." [4]

Listen to the distributors

In hard times it is easy for distributors to stop handling comics because of something like having to pay for orders in advance. These little things can cause big problems unless the publisher listens to the whole supply chain.
Keep the whole industry healthy
All the comic sellers rely on the same retailers and in general confidence in the industry. If one part of the industry suffers it pulls everyone down.

Comments from readers

Hi Chris,

I enjoyed reading your "The Economics of Comics" page, and thank you again for citing me for the figures you used. I have a couple of insights that I wanted to share with you that may be useful for this article.

First, I should point you toward Russ Muheras' work on the Golden Age period covering up to 1950. His data shows monthly figures across many comic book companies, not just National (DC) and Timely (Marvel). He posted his data on the newsgroups many years ago, and I kept a copy of it (it was my inspiration to do 1950 onward). If you would like, I can provide that data to you as well.

With regard to the 1950-1987 figures, I would recommend you to chart the data averaging the first half and the second half of the years. The reason is that the second half of the year typically outsells the first half, making your graph spike every other data point. By charting both halves separately, one is left with an incorrect perception of volatility of comic sales, when in fact there is usually a trend. For that reason, redisplaying that graph with annual monthly figures would be more informative.

Unfortunately, that slightly complicates the years with missing data: 2nd Half 1969 Marvel, 1st Half 1976 DC & 1st Half 1979 DC. Certainly we can make good estimates based upon the other evidence. Looking at the trends for the years before and after and comparing with its rival for similarity, we see that there are some extremely good trends to rely on for this.

For example, for DC, we know that 2nd Half data should comprise around 53% of the 1976's total (it was 52.95% in 1975, 53.05% in 1977, and 53.46% for Marvel in 1976). Likewise, DC's 2nd Half data should represent about 50% of 1979's total (it was 49.48% in 1978, 50.30% in 1980, and 49.66% in 1979 for Marvel). These are extremely fortuitous similarities, making us pretty sure of our estimate. For 1969 Marvel, the relationship to DC was too stark for comparison at the time, so looking at Marvel trends is the best way to estimate 1969. For 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970 and 1971, the 2nd Half data represented 54.91%, 54.97%, 54.63%, 56.34%, 54.28% and 54.39% respectively. Thus, we would expect 1969 to have between 54% and 55% of its sales in the 2nd Half.

With that, the sales number look like this, DC in the first column, Marvel in the 2nd (asterisks around the three approximated figures):

1950 7,791,402 5,783,231
1951 8,189,473 5,622,083
1952 7,753,983 7,221,873
1953 7,500,395 5,714,252
1954 7,228,246 5,614,870
1955 6,558,787 5,233,731
1956 6,979,763 5,433,062
1957 7,865,649 3,933,820
1958 7,149,795 2,442,963
1959 7,313,258 2,486,417
1960 7,375,652 2,690,237
1961 7,328,295 3,117,459
1962 6,650,058 3,290,002
1963 6,772,973 3,755,184
1964 7,066,454 4,612,986
1965 6,642,447 5,404,393
1966 7,337,539 6,640,382
1967 6,324,335 7,042,993
1968 6,292,497 8,117,844
1969 5,285,131 8,042,000*
1970 5,491,148 7,528,171
1971 5,074,665 7,466,990
1972 4,771,124 5,830,898
1973 4,726,325 5,825,938
1974 4,316,382 6,002,617
1975 4,318,844 5,833,420
1976 3,919,000 *6,394,995
1977 4,267,838 7,009,428
1978 3,548,649 6,428,124
1979 3,113,000 *5,780,008
1980 2,801,946 5,402,625
1981 2,987,088 5,057,324
1982 3,222,133 5,985,626
1983 3,428,704 5,658,933
1984 3,102,027 6,609,716
1985 3,117,865 7,019,202
1986 2,450,440 7,156,977
1987 2,994,904 7,498,526

I hope you find this helpful. Best of luck in your pursuits.

Sales figures 2002- 2006
1987 for comparison (adding up Marvel and DC from the previous chart)	10 million
1987-2002	?????
January 2002	6.6 million
July 2002	6.2 million
January 2003	5.6 million
July 2003	6.4 million
January 2004	5.2 million
July 2004	6.1 million
January 2005	5.0 million
July 2005	6.5 million
January 2006	5.6 million
July 2006	7.4 million