March 2012 is the fifth anniversary of The Comics Chronicles site, which began with a posting that included the sales figures I had collected to that point that had appearing in the Statements of Ownership in comics from 1960 to 1969.
I promised at the time to provide more years later on — but I didn’t realize how much later on. What happened is that as I continued to look into what titles and years I still didn’t have data for, I realized there were too many holes yet to go forward with simple rankings. So I have continued plugging holes and adding data — and here in the waning minutes of March five years later, I have just added the 3,000th postal statement containing post-1959 comics sales figures to my database. More than 450 titles from more than a dozen publishers from the last 52 years are included.
So I won’t be able to make the anniversary month, but a large update is forthcoming, nearly doubling the number of titles for the 1960 list, for example. It took me and those helping two years to locate the first 2,000, but a decade to get the next thousand. There are major changes coming to the 1960s lists, and I will be posting those first.
My expectation is that fewer than a thousand more remain to be found — and now I believe I know where the majority of them appeared. So when I do the updates this time around I will be including a hit list of specific titles, years, and in many cases, exact issues yet to be surveyed; I’ll also involve the Comichron Facebook page in the process, so readers can help. There are a lot of cases where I have the sales figure but not the entire Statement, which includes a lot of useful data; I’m looking to add all of those to the files as well.
So while I’m not nearly done with this lifelong project, the home stretch is visible up ahead. Stay tuned to Comichron in the weeks ahead: it won’t take five years this time!
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 upcoming release, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The High Country. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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