The Direct Market saved Superman’s world. Jim Shooter, former editor in chief at Marvel, has embarked on his blog on a discussion of the history of the distribution business for comics, delving into such fun buts of minutiae as affadavit returns. (See Chuck Rozanski’s piece on the Mile High II collection, a batch of … Read more
by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley With the release of the second Iron Man film, we’re finally restoring a feature on the site that was first posted when the previous film came out, but was lost in our server crash a ways back: postal statement sales figures for the series, complete for the 20th … Read more
With Apple’s iPad tablet product launching, much speculation surrounds what, if any, long-lasting impact the product and its like will have on the comic-book industry. Several efforts have been underway for some time to deliver comics electronically, and the addition of the new system has unsurprisingly generated much conversation. The old issues about hard-copy-versus-virtual-copy are … Read more
By request — and finding that I had almost all of them — I have posted all the circulation data published in the main Superman title beginning in 1960 and running until DC stopped publishing sales data in 1987. By that time, the series had transformed into Adventures of Superman; it may appear to be … Read more
One of the few major publishers still shipping comics to subscribers Periodical Class — and thus filing Statements of Ownership with sales figures — is Archie. Seeing the Statements for it is always particularly useful, as Archie owes more of its sales to the newsstand and thus direct market numbers are not very meaningful. As … Read more
I thought I’d exhausted all the answers the Comichron database potentially had on Watchmen questions — but this week is throwing some curveballs. I’ve had several requests in the last few days for information about the Charlton super-hero titles from the 1960s, specifically the characters that were the partial inspiration for the Watchmen. The challenge … Read more