Today is being celebrated as the 75th anniversary of Superman’s first appearance, so I thought I would update one of the resources on the site. I now have the information from every single circulation form with sales data ever published in the main Superman title; I had been missing a few of the details when I first posted this material four years ago here, but now it is all online. (I’ve got everything for Action, too — that post is coming soon.)
Sales data begins in Superman in 1960 and runs until DC stopped publishing postal statements in 1987. By that time, the series had transformed into Adventures of Superman;
it may appear to be information for two titles, but as far as the
Postal Service regulations were concerned, it’s all one series. (It later changed back to Superman with #650.)
Superman, we see in the yearly tables,
was the #1 title for several years in the 1960s — and probably in
1963-64 as well, years in which DC published Statements with no sales
figures.
While the Statement of Ownership period at DC is only a chunk
of the title’s long history, I include a little bit about estimated
sales before 1960 and after 1987. Everything from 1996 to present can be found
in the monthly sales charts here on site; that gives us about 44 years of data.
The main title alone has had total all-time sales in the nine figures, just in North America.
I also have a post from a few years ago getting into how many copies of Action #1 were initially printed and sold.
Comichron founder John Jackson Miller has tracked the comics industry for more than 25 years, including a decade editing the industry’s retail trade magazine; he is the author of several guides to comics, as well as more than a hundred comic books for various franchises.
He is the author of novels including Star Wars: Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Dawn, Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War, and his latest release, Star Trek: Discovery – Die Standing. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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