"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
The organized time skip is surprising though if they really do jump ahead a several years in the end. They've never really set a uniformed aging, aging some kid characters while keeping others the same age for decades. Or speaking on some peoples new ages while keeping others perpetually a set range etc
A reboot? Hah! They're kicking DC's butt right now.
All-new number 1s? ... possibly, but they just did that.
Also they just released, with a lot of promoting, several female-lead books that are making a splash. It'd be silly to restart them at least, since they'd be at, what, issue 7-8? So I suspect only some books would be hit.
The article said reboot, so I'm more making fun of them.
I do find the story structure of 'tell a run, allow it to end, then at the new number 1 do something different,' works pretty well from purely a story standpoint.
Agreed on the events being weak. The follow-ups to them tend to be pretty good, but the events themselves are usually less interesting than the status quo change fallout.
I like that too, but only when it's necessary. For example, DCnU's Green Arrow run was horrible. When Lemire jumped on board, they should have relaunched it. To distant itself from the previous run. But Marvel does it too much and it's just a cash grab, IMO, because #1's sell better.
Marvel sales units are down, though. Both DC and Marvel vs 3 or so years ago. So, it's no surprise.
There's some that I don't think have been necessary- the Daredevil one, where he moved towns, or Captain Marvel, when she went to space, but most of them have reflected significant team changes and such.
I've looked at the numbers for the big books like Hulk, Avengers, Iron Man, FF, etc... The sales were higher back than vs today. Unless I missed something. But Marvel sales aren't what they used to be.
They're higher in almost everything else, though, and there's more of them. X-men went from 3 books with X-men in the title to 5, and so did Avengers (granted, Mighty and World are lower tier, but still).
Then you have new franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy, and a number of solos selling good that weren't then, or simply didn't exist- Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye, that fun stuff.
Marvel has a ton of second-tier books and each of their main lines is maintaining larger number of books selling a good amount.
Like the site says, July was literally the highest-selling month since Diamond became sole comic distributor in 1997. That's a 17 year high- though you have to go back a couple years into the pre-diamond exclusive era to get higher, so more like a 20-some year high.
To mention something else about the sales chart- the number 300 position, five years ago, was 4,000 sales. Now it's 6,000. The comic industry is increasing it's number of reasonably-selling titles, even if it has a bit fewer individually very-high selling titles.
And here are the figures for 1997-2012:
2013 - 31,243,347 estimated units
2012 - 30,278,745 estimated units.
2011 - 29,522,809 estimated units
2010 - 29,998,200 estimated units
2009 - 34,167,744 estimated units
2008 - 37,269,988 estimated units
2007 - 38,132,744 estimated units
2006 - 34,647,105 estimated units
2005 - 32,461,832 estimated units
2004 - 32,021,066 estimated units
2003 - 28,974,336 estimated units
2002 - 28,473,404 estimated units
2001 - 25,349,296 estimated units
2000 - 21,948,494 estimated units - Joe Quesada becomes EIC.
1999 - 24,111,104 estimated units
1998 - 27,015,555 estimated units
1997 - 32,664,192 estimated units
Last edited by Senor Cage on Aug 27th, 2014 at 05:32 AM
Those aren't particularly representative ones. IF just got a crap relaunch, Cap five years ago was right off of his return... dunno about Ghost Rider.
Spider-man, on the flip side, is up. June 2011, two issues in the 50ks. June 2014, 100k and 80k (not using July because July 2011 had a 'special' issue, but the total's still less).
Deadpool was at 27k, now he's at 49k... and involved in multiple "Deadpool vs X" books that go from 54k to 36k.
Different books move up and down.
Btw, where are you getting the unit totals per company? I can find the overall, but not Marvel or DC only.
Going by the overall, so far, 2014 has 46 million units in the top 300, and 2011 had 37.9 million by it's July. Considering Marvel's had good market share throughout... it seems odd that their total units would drop.
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