Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The LSH-- A Top Ten Selling Title!

With sales of 411,200 copies, it remains firmly in the Top Ten!

Oh, wait. That was 1968 .

Bah the Legion can't even outsell Superman's Girlfriend: Lois Lane.

I propose a bold new direction,

1) with more coniving by the girls.
2) Also I think that in each issue a Legionnaire should appear on the cover wearing a gorilla suit.
3) Also there should be a new 'Jungle Boy' character that could be used to hook in the Tarzan market.

More seriously if you look at the data for some of the other years, Adventure's top years were likely in the mid sixties.

The whole market was hammered in 69 when the price went up to 15cents. I'm also thinking that around that time the baby boom's effect of pumping 10 to 12 year old customers to the spinner rack was ending.

I'd judge the change in tone in the comics themselves a few years later to echo the average age of the comics customer creeping up. A trend that continues to this day.

Yeah, it looks the 520,000 Adventure sold in 1965 is probably going to be the highest Legion sales ever reached, with the overall decline in sales throughout the 70s.

And where are those 520,000 readers today?

Wow, 500K is a huge number. I am guessing other comics of the time were selling just as well.

So when they were the #2 DC comic in the eighties they were selling less but in comparison they were selling higher than the other DC titles.

I wish comics were 10 cents again.

Was there that many readers or was it just that there were that many copies shipped out to all the drug stores across America? At that time, IIRC, the books weren't returnable and the publishers sure didn't short print or whatever else they do today. I remember getting a ton of old books when I was young, coverless, because that's what the retailers had to send back.

They were the sixth best selling title in 1965 (at a time when the six best selling titles were all DC).

In the early 80s, they were DC's second best selling title, but I'm not sure how many Marvel titles were outselling them or what the overall figures are. Superman was selling under 100,000 copies in 1980, but was selling over 150,000 after the Byrne reboot (when it was DC's best-selling title), so that gives a kind of rough estimate.

Those are paid circulation figures, which means that they were ones that were actually bought by customers. Total circulation figures would be much higher.

I've got the sales bible somewhere at home with all the circulation figures up to 2004 or 2005. I started doing a list of all Legion sales from day one but it got pushed to the wayside a while back.

EDE or LL, when did Marvel start out selling DC? I thought they were a over night sensation.

In 1965 the top 6 titles were DC? Wow, hard to believe with Spidey, the FF, and the Avengers.

I wonder when Marvel got into the top five? Anybody know? It would be interesting.

Personally, I think that more gasps of astonishment in each issue are the way to go. You, know, as in, "(Gasp!) I can't believe that character x is..." You can't deny that the book really sold well when this scripting practice was the norm, now can you? (I suppose that chokes would work, too, for the same reason.)

I was actually a little surprised that they hadn't even broken the top ten by the end of the 60s, assuming these numbers are right. I think that Spider-Men and then the New X-Men are what really put Marvel in the lead. Though Marvel taking the lead is really much more a matter of their sales declining much more slowly than that of DC's, rather than passing DC by increasing sales.

Take a look at 1969. When comics went to 15cents DC's number dropped like a stone whereas Amazing Spider-man was pretty much unchanged from 1968 (370k copies).

I'd imagine it cracked the Top 5 within a year or two.

So what really happened there?


My personal theory

With fewer new customers, I'd conjecture that Weisinger's (and other DC editors) editorial strategy became less effective after 1965. Ie repeating the same 3year cycle of stories wasn't good because 3 years later there'd by fewer customers that hadn't seen it before.

Marvel from the beginning was positioned in a retention strategy, longer stories, character changes over time. So there was more consequences costs for stopping comics (ie you wouldn't finish the story). Marvel fans wanted to know whether Peter got the girl. Everyone already knew Superman and Lois would never get together.

By the time DC figured it out a lot of their fans had moved on. No surprise that in the top selling early 80s titles for DC were the most Marvel-style books (NTT and LSH).

But of course the long string of continuity also introduced the barrier to adoption for kids trying comics out. Everything that has happened to the industry can probably be explained in terms of those market dynamics.

I think that's probably pretty much accurate.

The price increases started making comics prohibitive to the "casual" reader, while the fanboys preferred the "Marvel" style. Add to that the fact that it increasingly became the fanboys who were making the comics, as the first generation of comic writers were succeeded by people who'd grown up as comic readers, and what resulted was the gradual "Marvelization" of comics. This, in turn, had the effect of making them even less friendly to the casual reader, and so they increasingly become a niche market.

Yeah, maybe all that marketing/story stuff is true.

I suspect it had more to do with kids got a quarter for their allowance. It was a fairly universal standard, maybe even coded in law. I'll have to ask my Ma. Anyhow, 25 cents got you two books or a 25 cent giant before the increase and one book after.

True but I'd wager there were fewer 10 year olds in North America in 1978 versus 1968.

While the allowance story may be true, spending all 25 cents on two 12 cent books left very little money for penny candy.

I suspect the budget in the 12 cent era was.

Superman .12
Candy .08
Contingency .05


In the 15 Cent era it was
Spider-man .15
Candy .10
Contingency .00

Mainly because inflation was increasing the price of candy as well.

Customer Retaining Power:

Candy > Spider-man > Superman

Of course now comics REALLY are priced out of the reach of kids.

It's obvious. This title needs WILDFIRE!

I imagine there are more viewers watching the Legion animated series on TV in 2006/2007 than there were readers of the Silver Age Legion in any given year. Hope the toons have the same staying power.

Re. Legion sales in the 70s and 80s, I can't remember if these figures represent newstand circulation only or all circulation (including subscriptions and whatnot). Don't take them as Bible but they're a decent indicator of sales. Earlier published circ figures probably do exist in the annual statements, I just haven't had time to look them up. The bolded numbers are average monthly circulation.

Superboy/LSH...12 months ending with #243: 202K (Klordny to Levitz/Earthwar)
Superboy/LSH...12 months ending with #255: 171K (Levitz/Earthwar to Conway)
LSH v.2.............12 months ending with #267: 111K (Conway period)
LSH v.2.............12 months ending with #279: 112K (Conway to Roy Thomas)
LSH v.2.............12 months ending with #291: 129K (Roy Thomas to early Levitz/Giffen)
LSH v.2.............12 months ending with #303: 160K (Levitz/Giffen, GDS period and aftermath. #2 title?)
Tales of LSH......12 months ending with #315: 129K (Last publicly available circ figures in 1984)

The highest circulation was less than half of typical 1960s readership.

The only sales data I found for the Levitz Baxter series were rankings for December 1986 showing LSH (v.3 issue #33) listed as #65 on the chart, below "Groo the Wanderer" and "Elfquest". How the mighty had fallen in only a few years.

If 160k copies a month was DC's 2nd highest selling title back in the early 80s, then comic sales haven't really declined *that* much in the last 20 years...

Makes sense. The only two titles I really liked from DC were those two.

You know when it comes to continuity and new readers I think you always need a "rookie". Much like Geoff used Stargirl and now Cyclone in the JSA.

In solo books? New younger supporting characters? A non costume sidekick? ohwell.

Good points Tamper lad.

I've read that the comic book market imploded in the early 1990s and the publishers -- especially DC -- struggled for years to get sales back up. So, things apparently did decline, but it's gotten better in the last few years. It's a cyclical thing.

Sales in comics began to decline the same time Super baby stories stopped coming.

Coincidence? I think not.

Super-baby Legion vs. Koko and his gorilla army = 500K in sales, easily. Admit it, you'd buy it.