Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion of Super-Heroes Sales Figures

Batman is an icon with many marketing outlets for recognition and interest building, including big name movies.

Not a fair comparison, really.

I actually followed this link and read the article.

The article does not say that this is the worst sales performance since 2004.

It says that comics have had the largest decline since 2004, which is not the same thing. Having the largest decline doesn't mean having the worst sales, since the decline could have started from a higher point. Having the largest decline doesn't even mean that the decline is all that much larger than the expected seasonal decline.

The article also points out that the larger decline happens because of a lack of hits, which is irrelevant to whether the Legion declines fast or slow.

And the article says:

ICV2 released their calculations for October this morning and verified my earlier estimates: LSH dropped another 2K and Adventure took a hit as well. Hopefully these numbers start to bottom out soon at a healthy level. 30K is actually a decent seller at DC, but the fact that the drops aren't decreasing any is worrisome.

LEGION:

05/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #1 -- 44,415, #39 out of 300 [50,106]
06/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #2 -- 39,102, #43 out of 300
07/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #3 -- 36,360, #45 out of 300
08/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #4 -- 34,239 #51 out of 300
09/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #5 -- 32,417 #55 out of 300
10/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #6 -- 30,246 #66 out of 300

ADVENTURE:

11/2009: Adventure Comics #4 -- 85,145 #6 out of 300
12/2009: Adventure Comics #5 -- 59,876 #21 out of 300 *
01/2010: Adventure Comics #6 -- 42,514 #33 out of 300 *
02/2010: Adventure Comics #7 -- 53,721 #23 out of 300 *
03/2101: Adventure Comics #8 -- 39,351 #39 out of 300
03/2010: Adventure Comics #9 -- 37,515 #44 out of 300
04/2010: Adventure Comics #10 -- 37,573 #41 out of 300
05/2010: Adventure Comics #11 -- 34,794 #54 out of 300
06/2010: Adventure Comics #12 -- 34,663 #55 out of 300
07/2010: Adventure Comics #516 -- 30,897 #63 out of 300
08/2010: Adventure Comics #517 -- 28,966 #61 out of 300
09/2010: Adventure Comics #518 -- 27,028 #71 out of 300
10/2010: Adventure Comics #519 -- 25,346 #76 out of 300

Graph is updated.

LSH #6 seems to have had some dropoff due to the incentive covers ending; the last dropoff was about 1800 and this one was 2200, so at least 400 and probably more were incentive covers.

The graph now includes REBELS and you can see 1) just how bad REBELS is doing without being cancelled, and 2) how big an effect Blackest Night had on it.

thanks, Ken!

plotted out so, it really makes current month-to-month attrition look very steep. One wonders when/if leveling out may come...

If the comics market in general is experiencing steeper drops,it may well be a sign that monthlies are heading for extinction, in favor of the lengthier/less frequent original GN.

It's not up there for comparison purposes but because Batman is considered one of the most stable books sales wise. The percentages that get released (before the actual sale estimates) are based on units of Batman comics sold because Batman tends to sell at a very consistent rate (not a lot of ups and downs). The reason they posted those Batman numbers was to try and use Batman (a steady seller) as a barometer of sales for the industry overall.

So if Batman was selling 100k for year and then two years later was only selling 50k than that probably means the industry as a whole suffered and you would expect any other book you were looking at to have a similar drop. So if LOSH sales figures had consistently declined by 2% and that was the same as Batman's sales were declining than it would look like the industry as a whole was declining.

Not trying to say LOSH needs to be at Batman levels to be good, but just that Batman is a good measure on how the industry is doing overall.

As for me, I think the retro boot has been poorly handled, the set-up Johns left really doesn't appeal to me and I don't think I'm the only one. the unnecessary changes just muddled the Legion even more and the xeno angle doesn't lend itself to really high action and fun superheroics, so not a whole lot to hook new readers. That and the Adventure story was a pretty big waste of time so far.

It USED to be before the Loeb/Lee "Hush" run - which is, indeed, why it was originally chosen as a benchmark. But since then it's jumped around as much as (or, going on to the Morrison/Battle for the Cowl stuff, more than) the average book.

Standard attrition is in the region of 1-2.5% a book. If you're dropping by less than 1%, never mind gaining, you're doing well. If you're consistently dropping by more than 2.5% a month, start to worry. [Drops before issue 3 don't count for this, especially the #1-2 drop which is more like 15-25% on average, and the effects of any variant covers should be factored in]

LSH v6 has been dropping at 5-6% a month for the past three months, and Adventure by more than 6%. That's FAR too high by anyone's measure (although someone said something about #6 not having variant covers when previous issues did? The drop from #4 to #5 was still 5.3% though...)

In the 80s and at least part of the 90s, Spider-Man was the benchmark book. Until mid-90s Spidey books became just as wonky as Batman books seem to be becoming (or already are).

If Batman hasnt been replaced as the yardstick, that may mean there currently are no books more stable than even the instability 'Booty describes above me.

Fables sales seems pretty consistent. Maybe even The Walking Dead. Maybe they could use one of them?

This is similar to the argument that countries are having about using USD as the benchmark against which everything is measured against. As long as the benchmark is stable things can be measured, else not so much.

Benchmarks are notoriously hard to replace. Everyone agrees that the old way doesn't work but there's never agreement on a new benchmark.

As for the declines on a specific book versus expected declines for a new run on any given comic. The best way to determine if the declines are outside recent industry norms is statistical analysis of expected falloffs for such runs.

Analysis Method

1) Treat the sales data for a book as exponential decay data.
2) Gather all new run data for the past two years.
2b) Normalize the data for all new runs within the past 2 years. (ie treat issue 1 of each run as 100 and work in percentages)
3) Do an inversion transformation on normalized sales data. This will be a logarithmic transform of the data series.
4) Do linear regression analysis on the transformed industry wide sales data and determine the 95% confidence intervals for expected falloff (slope of the regression line).
5) If you've done 1-3 you should have the slope data for the two Legion books. Compare the falloffs for LSH and Adventure to the confidence band.

From here it's a matter of comparing the slopes of the LSH falloffs to determine if they fall within the expected falloff intervals ranges. If not, the books are performing better or worse than industry norms.

I would guess that Reboot's observation is correct but this would be the rigorous scientific evidence.

I was wrong about the variants, actually; V6 #6 does have a variant. I didn't see it on Google but there are people on Ebay selling it.

Just for the record, my observation was indeed anecdotal, based on some years of sales chart watching .

Gathering the data to take a proper crack at it would take forever (not so much the raw numbers, more the number [& ratio(s)] of variant covers, ring-type giveaways, crossovers and other skews, the effects of which would have to be quantified...)

Diamond top 100 is out. LSH ranks at 65 with at sales of 40.54% of Batman's, while Adventure clocks in at 71 with 37.63% of Batman's. The two titles appear to be closing the gap between each other, unfortunately it's closer to Adventure's lower sales level.

I'd estimate LSH above 25K and Adventure slightly below it, but it's hard to get more exact as Batman is once again somewhat unpredictable.

Is part of the problem that Legion Fandom is to fractured from all the resets? You got fans of the original pre-crisis LSH, 5YL, Reboot & the 3boot. Plus some fans of the pre-crisis LSH view the current series as a retcon of the pre-crisis LSH.

At least The Great Darkness Saga Hardcover is on the New York Times Hardcover Graphic Books best seller list.

Interestingly, even though GDS makes the Times list, it didn't crack the top ten in the Direct Market (Still waiting for the final list to see where it ranked).

ICV2 numbers are out for November. Legion takes a tumble of nearly 4K (variant cover loss may be a part of this), while the silver lining has Adventure dropping less than 1K for the first time in memory. So does this mean the 25K level is the Legion's wheelhouse now? Certainly other books have survived on much less. December numbers will be interesting.

On another note, the Great Darkness Saga Deluxe edition shipped 2,194 copies (#24 on the chart).

LEGION:

05/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #1 -- 44,415, #39 out of 300 [50,106]
06/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #2 -- 39,102, #43 out of 300
07/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #3 -- 36,360, #45 out of 300
08/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #4 -- 34,239 #51 out of 300
09/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #5 -- 32,417 #55 out of 300
10/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #6 -- 30,246 #66 out of 300
11/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #7 -- 26,439 #65 out of 300

ADVENTURE:

12/2009: Adventure Comics #5 -- 59,876 #21 out of 300 *
01/2010: Adventure Comics #6 -- 42,514 #33 out of 300 *
02/2010: Adventure Comics #7 -- 53,721 #23 out of 300 *
03/2101: Adventure Comics #8 -- 39,351 #39 out of 300
03/2010: Adventure Comics #9 -- 37,515 #44 out of 300
04/2010: Adventure Comics #10 -- 37,573 #41 out of 300
05/2010: Adventure Comics #11 -- 34,794 #54 out of 300
06/2010: Adventure Comics #12 -- 34,663 #55 out of 300
07/2010: Adventure Comics #516 -- 30,897 #63 out of 300
08/2010: Adventure Comics #517 -- 28,966 #61 out of 300
09/2010: Adventure Comics #518 -- 27,028 #71 out of 300
10/2010: Adventure Comics #519 -- 25,346 #76 out of 300
10/2010: Adventure Comics #520 -- 24,540 #71 out of 300

We are now worse than we are after 8 Shooter issues, and are below all pre-Shooter issues. Oddly, ranking is nowhere near as bad (V5 #45 at 25783 was ranked #96, Adventure 520 is lower at #71). Some of it is explained as fewer event issues at the top of the ranking however.

LSH V6 is now barely above the level of most The Legion issues, and is actually below #1, #25, and #26. In the reboot, we are below issue #93.

Updated graph.

^ Could the ranking factor just be due to the fact that fewer people are buying comics these days?

I include rankings mostly because my predecessor did, but I think overall they are a relatively useless indicator of a book's performance other than a very broad one, as the output from DC and Marvel varies so dramatically month-to-month meaning there's a lot of context to the number.

It's crazy to me that only 25,000 people buy Adventure in the direct market.

I checked the circulation of a Maxim Magagzine at the airport the other day and it was like 3.5 million.

Comics need the newstands more than ever (and I wish there was a way to measure those sales). And digital distribution doesn't seem like it will be able to work like the newstands did anytime soon.

^ I don't get why comics aren't sold there anymore anyway. Do the newsagents not want them? Is it too expensive for the companies or something?

Surely comics would sell better if they were in places that lots of people from all walks of life go into EVERY DAY rather than hidden away in isolated shops which not even regular comic readers go into more than once or twice a week. And which can be very off-putting to first-time/casual readers.

I developed my addiction to comics through buying a couple every time I went with my Mum to buy a newspaper or some groceries. I probably would not have gotten into the hobby if I were growing up today.

If comics want to survive, they need to go back to the newsstands IMO. I don't see web-comics as the future at all (though I could be wrong there).

Even though Comics are expensive, there just isn't the same profit margin as there is with a magazine and vendors were ditching comics in droves to make better use of space, which led to the Direct Market (that's a broad generalization, but is essentially the crux of it). Add to that Newstand periodicals need to be returnable and Comics through the DM aren't. I don't think DC, Marvel or anyone else has cost mechanisms in place for massive overprints that will include a huge return rate (and most likely pulping) from clients.

Now in the intervening years, magazine sales have crashed (all print has), so there may be a better climate for comics, but other than Archie, and the odd X and Bat title, you still don't see them in magazine sections of stores that often.

^ So it's the vendors who don't want them because they're not getting value for money from selling them? OK. I can see that the companies don't have much choice but to be stuck in the DM ghetto then.

That also explains why a bookshop/newsstand I went into recently here in Australia was selling new comics for upwards of $15 dollars EACH! I couldn't believe the price I was seeing! Especially when a comic shop about a hundred meters away was selling those same comics for the standard Australian price of around $4-$5. But I guess now I know why they're not sold in newsstands anymore.

Oddly enough, single issues are still sold in some Books-a-Millions and Barnes and Nobles. Do they have some sort of return agreement with their distributors?

I'm curious about that too. It's always been stated that Archie Comics (and Batman, Superman and Spider-Man) sell like hotcakes at those types of places.

I know I'm in airports all the time and there is like a newstand every 20 feet filled with people who buy *something*. Whenever I buy a magazine or paper, I even leave it on the plane when I'm done, not bothering to keep it; I just want *something* to read for the next 20 minutes before I move on. This market should be taken advantage of.

DC, Marvel and other comic book companies should be all over this--sure it's hard to figure out a way to make it work, but that's why these companies have thousands of employees who aren't on the creative side. To get things done.

Jeepers, I might have to apply to one of these companies and get them back on track.

Most magazines are usually around $5.00-$6.00; comics aren't that far off.