by Xavier Lancel
Welcome to a new analysis of the Marvel sales. Reminder: I'm French, that's why I'm talking funny. Please address your complaints to my over-drugged cyclists country.
Reminder: those sales are estimates, sales to comics shops located in North America. American comics do get sold somewhere else in their original floppy edition. Keep also in mind that just because a copy is sold to a shop doesn't mean it's sold to a customer. This would be way too easy. Digital sales are not taken into account.
This month, a horde of mini-series (or ongoing, who knows, Marvel hasn't been very clear on that) is invading the Marvel chart. Only one thing is sure: everything will be relaunched (or should I say renumbered) past Secret Wars (SW). The Last Days banner, supposed to frighten customers ("Oh, look, that's his last adventure in the old MU! "), is working like a charm for titles who were struggling to stay alive.
As always, tons of Star Wars franchise comics are sold, reordered, repackaged. The $5 price tag is less predominant this month but the test worked: customers are ready to pay $5 for, not caviar in a nice box, but paté wrapped in journal paper: you'll have to do your own cover, cut the ads and add the still missing 2 pages that were lost "to keep the prices low "...
“It should sell like pancakes in bookstores.”
You mean, “It should sell like hotcakes in bookstores.”
Wait a minute… hotcakes don’t sell in bookstores…
This was great! It appears to me that your commentary has somewhat muted but nonetheless thank you for this list. I think it is very smart to compare the numbers to issue #2s because of the overinflation of orders for #1s. Great job!
One day or another, I will translate a french expression word by word in english and everybody will wander what I’m talking about :p
Oh, and I suppose that the House of M floppy collection is in the Graphic Novel top 300 instead of the floppy one for the same reason than the one you mentionnend about Night Nurse in the last analysis, aka the presence of a code specific to bookstores.
Il est comme un Juif parlant chinois! N’est-ce pas? [hmm… the spellchecker only stumbles over “parlant”…]
Or as the Turks say, “Konuya Fransız kaldım!”
HOUSE OF HEM had an EAN…
Maybe Marvel is doing this so it stays in stock at the Diamond warehouse longer?
Justin: seeing that this analysis was written weeks before the bad feedback on the May analysis, I can assure you that it didn’t change the way I wrote this specific column.
Thanks for the #2 comment, that’s something I really wanted to change once taking over.
“See what I was saying about X-Men’92? How could it outsell this, a retelling of the X-Men best storyline?”
Doesn’t seem that surprising. The whole “X-Men in a future dystopia” bit been revisited a couple dozen times or so since the original in various What-Ifs, AU’s, and knock-offs of the original story. Can’t imagine anyone was just dying for yet another one. Meanwhile, a lot of folks have a lot of fondness for the old 90’s X-Men cartoon. Seems like every 3rd Marvel fan I talk to got into comics thanks to that show, even all these years down the line.
Oh, it was that popular on your side of the ocean? I haven’t seen any full episode of that show, so I couldn’t tell if X-en 92 was closer to in tone to the comics or to the show (itself close to the comics).
“The $5 price tag is less predominant this month but the test worked: customers are ready to pay $5 for, not caviar in a nice box, but paté wrapped in journal paper: you’ll have to do your own cover, cut the ads and add the still missing 2 pages that were lost “to keep the prices low “…”
So what comics with 20 pages have actually sold for $5? It’s not like I love any raised prices, but the $5 comics I’m aware of, Marvel has all made oversized. Years of Future past #1, for instance, had 30 story pages. That’s one and a half comic for one and a quarter of the price–considering your interest in price per page, that’s an odd omission.
“I’m more than baffled by this. 1992 was probably one of the worst period for X-Men: Chris Claremont was out, the team was divided into gold and blue teams, there was never ending crossovers, ugly art design with pouches, jackets, guns and claws everywhere….and people are nostalgic for that?!”
People are nostalgic for the ’92 animated series, which this book emulates and which recruited an uncanny amount of new X-fans.
Niels: Oh, of course the $5 have more story. I don’t have access to all those $5 marvel issues so I don’t know if they all have , as you said, 30pages of story so couldn’t say for sure how many pages of art there was for this price. But even with 30pages of story, that’s still a price per page higher than 20pages/2.99$ comics at other companies, so no real wonders here.
The real test was to still sell in huge quantity with a higher than usual cover price, no matter how many pages of art you have. The test worked.
Spider-ladies seam to be in free fall, will be interesting to see how things change (or stay the same) after relaunch.