{"id":5452,"date":"2010-05-07T17:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T18:00:56","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T23:00:56","slug":"iron-man-comic-book-sales-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/07\/iron-man-comic-book-sales-through\/","title":{"rendered":"Iron Man comic book sales through history"},"content":{"rendered":"
by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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With the release of the second <\/span>Iron Man <\/span><\/b><\/i>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 Century<\/b><\/a>. This version is more detailed, providing print runs, subscription totals, and other information for the core Iron Man title and its immediate descendants.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When Marvel renegotiated its restrictive agreement with its distributor in 1968<\/span><\/a>, it was suddenly able to double its number of offerings. It did so by drawing upon the characters in several of its “double feature” titles. Iron Man<\/span> and Captain America<\/span> fissioned from Tales of Suspense<\/span>, with Captain America<\/i> continuting the original series’ numbering. Iron Man<\/i> began with a fresh #1, only after a weird one-month gap during which the feature was paired with the Tales to Astonish<\/span> orphan, Sub-Mariner, in the Iron Man and Sub-Mariner<\/span> one-shot.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Marvel did not publish sales figures for the title for a very long time, but by the time it did, Iron Man<\/span> was a mid-range seller along with the other Avengers titles. The series peaked above 200,000 copies in the mid-1980s during David Michelinie<\/b> and Bob Layton<\/b>‘s first run on the title; it approached that level again several times before collapsing during the market recession of the mid-1990s.<\/p>\n

Marvel addressed the decline then \u2014 and several more times \u2014 with the same strategy: restarting the series from a new #1. The “Heroes Reborn” volume 2 and the “Heroes Return” volume 3 resuscitated sales (this run included John’s year on the title<\/b><\/a>), as did the Warren Ellis<\/b> Volume 4 in 2004. But unlike with Amazing Spider-Man<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and Fantastic Four<\/span>, Marvel has yet to permanently reunify the series into a single numbering. The current flagship Iron Man title, Invincible Iron Man<\/b><\/i>, shipped its 25th issue in April.<\/p>\n

It’s apparent that the same postal permit was used for the series during its first three volumes; subscribers for the previous series were simply rolled into the next one. However, we don’t know if Statements of Ownerships have appeared in the post-2004 versions, so we’re reluctant to call the file on the original title closed. If you’ve spotted Statements in the later runs, please let us know.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[79,29,42],"class_list":["post-5452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-iron-man","tag-statements-of-ownership","tag-title-spotlights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5452","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=5452"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6601,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5452\/revisions\/6601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}