{"id":3446,"date":"2020-04-01T21:16:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T21:16:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T15:58:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T20:58:02","slug":"a-look-at-market-35-years-ago-its","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/01\/a-look-at-market-35-years-ago-its\/","title":{"rendered":"A look at the market, 35 years ago: It’s Secret Wars II versus Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

March comics sales are out… from 35 years ago! March 1985 charts for Capital City Distribution<\/a><\/b> are now on Comichron<\/b>, our oldest Direct Market charts yet. Secret Wars II<\/i> #1<\/a><\/b> launched as one the biggest sellers to date in comic shops. Find the charts here<\/a><\/b>.<\/p>\n

The unit sales reported are the actual preorders Capital received. Co-owner John Davis<\/b> kept index card records with all sales starting in January 1985. He provided them to me in 1996 when the company folded; from them, I’ve harvested data for nearly 24,000 comics and graphic novels.<\/p>\n

\"<\/span>Note that in early 1985, Capital still only represented a fraction of the sales of publishers that still had a lot of newsstand and subscriber activity. On Amazing Spider-Man <\/i>#266<\/a><\/b>, its sales are about 8% of the overall. On Direct-only titles like Marvel Fanfare <\/i>#21<\/a><\/b>, it’s more like 20%.<\/p>\n

While Crisis on Infinite Earths<\/i> #4<\/a><\/b> nearly outsold Uncanny X-Men<\/i><\/b>\u00a0#195<\/b><\/a> (and did beat it in dollar sales), DC sales were still fairly weak at Capital; the Superman titles selling in the 4,000s is no misprint. DC’s discounts through the distributor weren’t yet competitive, but that’d change.<\/p>\n

A sign of how much the Direct Market was growing can be seen in orders for Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe<\/i> #1<\/a><\/b>, which got postponed from 1985 to 1989 and had its page count reduced 33%. Capital’s orders for the book increased by 66% over 1985’s in the 1989 solicitation!<\/p>\n

More charts from yesteryear to come over the next few weeks on Comichron. No need for sales chart withdrawal with dozens of years to catch up on!
\n<\/p>\n

<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

March comics sales are out… from 35 years ago! March 1985 charts for Capital City Distribution are now on Comichron, our oldest Direct Market charts yet. Secret Wars II #1 launched as one the biggest sellers to date in comic shops. Find the charts here. The unit sales reported are the actual preorders Capital received. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19,18],"class_list":["post-3446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1980s-sales","tag-capital-city-distribution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3446"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6180,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3446\/revisions\/6180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}