Wired magazine has a pictorial and interview feature on “Secret Lives of Comics Store Employees” — where we get a look at the shops themselves and some of the people who work there. It’s the kind of feature we wouldn’t have seen a decade ago, when more stories tended to depict comics shops as outside … Read more
I am often asked about comics sales in the old days — meaning the really old days of the Golden Age. One of the people who’s done a lot of work in this area is Russ Maheras, who provided me his Audit Bureau of Circulation research on Famous Funnies a few years back. Launched in … Read more
Something actually went up on Wall Street: The market evidently liked what it heard in Marvel‘s quarterly report for the fourth quarter of 2008, with the stock closing up more than 15% to $27.55 after the earnings call. Marvel’s third quarterly report had topped Wall Street estimates; so, too, did this one, with Reuters reporting … Read more
Here’s something that should interest collectors of Dell, Gold Key, and Whitman comics — and the later Valiant and Acclaim comics: The complete sales history of Turok, Son of Stone is now on The Comics Chronicles, including all data from all the Statements of Ownership ever printed in the title. We even go back to … Read more
Some more stories about comics retailers in the press. The Chillicothe Gazette of Chillicothe, Ohio, covers the closure of Acme Comics, a fixture in the city since 1993. Kathy Hall, who cofounded the store with her late husband, told the paper that while traffic has not decreased, the number of regular purchasers has because of … Read more
Edit: Caught a simple but embarrassingly large math error, thanks to John diBello. The ICV2 data included Diamond data within. Corrections made to the math, and new info below… San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs has his annual look at the Nielsen Bookscan numbers for trade paperbacks online, and again it provides a lot of interesting … Read more