Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Legion Sales Figures/Ranks of the Silver and other Ages

First of all...there's an awesome website about historic comic circulation numbers that is only going to become more awesome IMO.

This data in this first post comes entirely from their website.

http://www.comichron.com/Default.aspx


I am going to mainly focus the numbers for the years the Legion was featured in Adventure Comics.

And awayyyy we go:

For comparison purposes, I'll start off with 1961, the year preceding the Legion moving into Adventure.

1961

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Uncle Scrooge Dell 853,928
2) Superman DC 820,000
3) Superboy DC 655,000
4) Jimmy Olsen DC 520,000
5) Lois Lane DC 515,000
6) Tarzan Dell 509,355
7) Batman DC 485,000
8) Action Comics DC 485,000
9) World's Finest Comics DC 480,000
10) Adventure Comics DC 460,000


Best selling Team Book of 1961:

12) JLA DC 335,000


Best selling Marvel Title of 1961:

39) Tales to Astonish Marvel 184,895


Best selling Marvel Team Book of 1961:

None in the top 50


1962

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Superman DC 740,000
2) Superboy DC 605,000
3) Lois Lane DC 490,000
4) Jimmy Olsen DC 470,000
5) Archie Archie 457,689
6) Casper Harvey 436,153
7) Action Comics DC 435,000
8) World's Finest Comics DC 420,000
9) Adventure Comics DC 415,000
10) Batman DC 410,000


Next best selling Team Book:

11) Justice League of America DC 340,000


Best selling Marvel Title:

44) Modeling with Millie Marvel 143,476


Best selling Marvel Team Book:

None in the top 50


The Legion/DC data for the years of 63 and 64 is unavailable due to the fact that DC didn't publish any numbers with their circulation statements in those years.

But according to at least one chart I have seen...the Legion sold well over 500k copies per month during the height of the Siegel era...the highest circulation figures ever for the Legion.


1965

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Superman DC 823,829
2) Superboy DC 672,681
3) Lois Lane DC 556,091
4) Jimmy Olsen DC 554,931
5) Action Comics DC 525,254
6) Adventure Comics DC 520,440
7) Archie Archie 467,552
8) World's Finest Comics DC 465,842
9) Batman DC 453,745
10)Disney's Comics & Stories Gold Key 410,209


Next best selling Team Book:

11) Justice League of America DC 389,285


Best selling Marvel Title:

50) Journey into Mystery Marvel 232,644


Best selling Marvel Team Book:

None in the top 50


1966

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Batman DC 898,470
2) Superman DC 719,976
3) Superboy DC 608,386
4) Lois Lane DC 530,808
5) Jimmy Olsen DC 523,455
6) World's Finest Comics DC 513,201
7) Archie Archie 491,691
8) Action Comics DC 491,135
9) Adventure Comics DC 481,234
10) Justice League of America DC 408,219


The next best selling team book(after the JLA), the best selling Marvel title, and the best selling Marvel Team Title are the all the same book for this year...

19) Fantastic Four Marvel 329,379


1967

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Batman DC 805,700
2) Superman DC 649,300
3) Superboy DC 547,100
4) World's Finest Comics DC 537,200
5) Archie Archie 484,648
6) Jimmy Olsen DC 450,700
7) Lois Lane DC 448,400
8) Detective Comics DC 425,700
9) Action Comics DC 420,900
10) Adventure Comics DC 412,800


Next best selling Team Book:

12) Justice League of America DC 385,800


Best selling Marvel Title:

14) Amazing Spider-Man Marvel 361,663


Best selling Marvel Team Book:

17) Fantastic Four Marvel 329,536


1968

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Superman DC 636,400
2) Archie Archie 566,587
3) Batman DC 533,450
4) Superboy DC 532,135
5) World's Finest Comics DC 480,115
6) Lois Lane DC 461,725
7) Jimmy Olsen DC 460,560
8) Action Comics DC 423,000
9) Betty and Veronica Archie 419,544
10) Adventure Comics DC 411,200


Next best selling Team Book:

15) Fantastic Four Marvel 344,865


Best selling Marvel Title:

12) Amazing Spider-Man Marvel 373,303


And now we get to the final year of the Adventure run, 1969 when Supergirl replaced the Legion as the lead in Adventure during the early part of the year.


1969

Title Publisher Circulation
1) Archie Archie 515,356
2) Superman DC 511,984
3) Superboy DC 465,462
4) Lois Lane DC 397,346
5) Betty and Veronica Archie 384,789
6) Action Comics DC 377,535
7) Amazing Spider-Man Marvel 372,352
8) World's Finest Comics DC 366,618
9) Batman DC 355,782
10) Adventure Comics DC 354,123


Next best selling Team Title:

12) Fantastic Four Marvel 340,363

The best selling Marvel Title was Spiderman which cracked the top 10 for the first time ever this year.

To Lightning Lad and Nightcrawler, I'm not sure if this topic is deserving of a separate thread apart from your regular sales figures thread. I went ahead and gave it it's own thread because the data is of a little different nature than the main sales thread.

Ok the first thing I want to point out is...it's pretty silly to say that being a part of the Superman Family wasn't a huge boon to the Legion.


The second thing I want to point out...the Legion was the best selling team book every year of the decade they were in publication..

That's pretty impressive considering that the JLA also featured Superman...and every other mainstream character of the DC Uni. More people were reading the Legion.

And that begs the question...why in the world did DC move them into the backup of Action?


I mean think about that...they moved their best selling team book into a backup slot in a solo character's book...


It's like Marvel moving the New X-Men into the backup slot in Spiderman 6 years into their run.

What a silly idea that was.

The only thing I can conclude is that while it dominated every team book of the decade and probably averaged out to a top 5 title for the decade...it was the worst selling title in the Superman family.


Nontheless...folks our Legion was the team of the Silver Age, and you never hear them described as such...you hear the Fantastic Four, you hear the JLA...but it was indeed the Legion.

The Legion was put in Action because Weisinger was told to give Supergirl her own book. Since he knew that he was leaving DC shortly anyway, he did not want to add to his workload and pulled a switch: Supergirl got Adventure, and the Legion got her spot in Action. It was a bad move for both titles, but that's why it was done.

I don't know which is more impressive: that the Legion was the best-selling super-hero team in the Silver Age, or that it was consistently outsold by Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen!

I love trivia like this and look forward to seeing the other eras and whatnots...


The most surprising thing to me is that the numbers are actually lower than I thought they would be... even today some titles will sell 100-200 thousand plus copies... and this is at $3 a copy nowadays versus 10-12 cents back then. This industry isn't in so dire a shape as people have been saying.

It was the Silver Age, not Golden Age. Back in the 40s, there was at least one steady million-plus seller.

It amazes me just how much DC's sales revolved around Superman.

Yeah I'll post some GA figures just for kicks..

I remain more surpsied by the fact that DC put it's top selling team title into a back up slot more than anything else.


Imagine Geoff Johns going into the office on Monday and finding out that the JSA has been put in the backup slot in Green Lantern...

I guess its a little surprising Weisinger wasn't veto-ed by SOMEone... he almost sank the whole Legion ship.

I'll go you one better...what I am amazed by is that all those top 5-7 finishes by Superman Family at the peak of the Silver Age...Jerry Siegel was more or less the main writer on every one of them.


Just as in the Golden Age he was the main writer when Supes was selling over a million per month.


Both times he left DC over financial disputes or military commitments Superman sales declined. In fact you could almost say an age ended.

Jerry Siegel just might be the greatest superhero writer...as well as the inventor of the genre.


Imagine a writer in today's market writing the top 5-7 selling books in the industry for nearly an entire decade.

There's not another writer of Superheroes in Jerry Siegel's class sales wise...no one even comes close. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby wish their titles sold as well as Jerry's....so do Alan Moore and Frank Miller.

That said...Jerry will strain his neck looking up at the top comic writer...who is probably a guy named Carl Barks...and his 3 million a month circulation figures for his Donald Duck stories during the late 40's and 50's.

LOL it almost makes the Byrne retcon seem tame by comparison doesn't it?

Yah...you know the Golden Age and Silver Age are really defined by what the oh say top 5 titles sold, more than what the typical title sold. At least that's the way it seems to me.


Those terms also have a lot more to do with DC than they do anything else...because both of them pretty much have time frames built around when DC was the #1 company.

The Golden Age of Spiderman for instance was 92-93 when ASM sold 500K+ copies per month..by far the best sales figures for Spidey, almost doubling his peak Silver Age Sales figures.


And Archie? Archie is a top 10 comic, right now..just like he was then.


And none of the figures I will be posting are going to include Mad Magainze which was the best selling comic from about 1960 to 1990..averaging well over a million copies per month during that time frame and peaking at about 2 million per month when DC and Marvel were hemmoraging readers in the 70's.

There is the question of depth of the market versus the top 10 though. I'd argue there was a wider variety of genre available in say the top 100 back in the 60s versus what's in the diamond top 100 today.

Not to say you can't get western or romance even Archie isn't really a factor in the Diamond figures etc these days but the numbers today don't do those numbers justice as a lot of that stuff is sold in book form or increasingly given away as free strips over the net and collected some time later.

Its just like magazines or TV, back then the medium was treated as a mass broadcast type whereas now products can be tailored for audiences as small as several thousand readers if you use an online model.

This is a fascinating thread! Thanks for posting this info Superboy! I've always been aware of Superman's dominance in comics over the decades, but to see it all laid out like that...

Thank you. Part of the reason I posted those was to show just how important being a part of the Superman Family was to the Legion staying in publication for the first decade of it's existence.


And the other thing I was hoping to show was that the Legion was an extremely popular title once upon a time.

More popular than the X-Men, FF, Avengers, JLA, Titans...more popular than Spiderman. More popular than Green Lanter, or the Silver Surfer, or Thor...

More popular than that IronMan guy that just set a bunch of box office records.

More popular than the quinessential Silver Age character...the Flash.


And that was true at the end of the Silver Age...not just the beginning.


Because I see Legion Fans all the time now say that the Legion's reduced sales are more a result of the decline of the audience than a decline of the popularity of the feature.

And while it is true that the audience is smaller...

The Legion has gone from being a perennial top 10-20 seller and DC's top selling team, to being a book that barely puts up the numbers to stay in print.


We've fallen a great deal....and as I'm going to show(kinda) when I post the Bronze Age numbers, in the Bronze Age, even though the Legion's sales went down from the Silver, their sales ranking went up(at least compared to other DC titles), and the Bronze Age is arguably the peak of the Legion's popularity compared to other comics.


In fact I think I'll start posting those numbers right now :tu

...still waiting....

LOL Sorry..I'll post them now.

Figuring the Bronze Age rank right now is quite a bit trickier due to the fact that I don't have all the numbers, nor am I certain of what all the top numbers are...that said, I do have some numbers for what I believe to be the best selling titles of the early part of the 70's and I think you'll see that the Legion compares very favorably when you compare the traditional numbers gaps between the elite sellers of the Silver Age(not to mention up to this day). As you yourself kind of noticed...the overall numbers were not that much greater in the Silver Age and my own observation is that it was really the top sellers that put up the huge numbers.

Anyway here we go...Bronze AGE.

My rankings for the Legion are guestimates...but I feel they are fairly accurate and will be the best we can do until Comichron gets it's 70's data complete.


What I will be doing is putting the annual circulation numbers for the Legion from my own collection and comparing them with some numbers of the top sellers in various eras found in this article:

http://www.nostalgiazone.com/doc/zine/05_Q2/funnybusiness.htm

along with the annual ciruclation numbers of Superman and Spiderman courtesy of the comichron, which I assume to be the top dogs of Marvel and DC(Warlord numbers are unavailable) for the decade..


And I'll be using the comments of mssrs Giffen, Grell and Shooter as a sort of guide for estimating the Legion's rank for these later eras.

These numbers are not perfect but I believe overall , my estimation is fairly accurate, there may be one or two titles that oldsold the Legion that I haven't accounted for...but IMO, the Legion had a better sales rank in the early 70's than it did in the Silver Age.

I am also basing my opinion on the comments of Mike Grell in inteveiws throughout the years where he claims the Legion was DC's top seller when he was on the book.

Edit: I don't have the circulation numbers for 73. I think they appeared in SLOSH #202, but my copy of that issue is coverless and missing the letters page. If anyone wants to get those numbers...feel free. You want the line that says total paid cirucation(lines X + line Y).


Here we go:

1974

Legion:
1974 - 225,427
(Source: Superboy starring the Legion #209 June 75)
ERA: Bates Cockrum/Grell

Spidey:
1974 - 288,232

Supes:
1974 - 285634

Various:

1974
Mad Magazine 2,132,655
Amazing Spider-Man 288,232
Superman 285,634
Archie 272,272
Incredible Hulk 202,592
Batman 193,223
House of Mystery 174,504
Daredevil 161,910
Archie Digest Magazine 137,857


As you can see..based on the available numbers, only 3 traditional comics outsold the Legion, Superman, Spiderman and Archie. Now the FF may be in there somwhere but I can't think of anything else that would be at that particular time, as the X-Men had not yet attained their dominant market position. So I'd put the Legion as a top 5 title for that year. And if you look at the numbers gaps between the Legion and Supes and Spidey those seem pretty similar with the gaps between the elite sellers in the Silver Age...not to mention our modern audience, where the #1 title usually sells 10-20K monthly better than anything else.


1975

Legion:
1975 - 220,000
(Source: Superboy starring the Legion #217 June 76)
ERA: Shooter/Bates Grell

Spiderman:
1975 - 273,773

Superman:
1975 - 296000


1976

Legion:
1976 - 218,000
(Source: Superboy starring the Legion #227 May 77)
ERA: Shooter/Bates Grell


Spiderman:
1976 - 282,159

Superman:
1976 - 273000


1977

Legion:
1977 - 184,528
(Source: Superboy and the Legion #239 May 78)
ERA: Levitz Sherman

Spiderman:
1977 - 281,860

Spiderman:
1977 - 235430

As you can see...while the Legion numbers took a huge hit, they weren't alone. While Marvel seemed to be maintaining it's numbers, DC was declining...and in fact you can see the signs of the DC implosion already appearing. I am still willing to bet not many titles, especially by DC outsold the Legion at this point. Although according to Mike Grell..Warlord did.


1978

The year of the DC implosion when they had to cancel @25 titles.


Legion:
1978 - 141,277
(Source: Superboy and the Legion #250 April 79)
ERA: Levitz/Conway Various


Spiderman:
1978 - 258,156

Superman:
1978 223222


1979

The Shooter Era begins at Marvel.


Legion
1979 - 162,265
(Source: LOSH #262 April 80)
ERA: Conway and...Sherman? He's the artist on #262 at least. I should probably go back and look at the other issues but I always thought Sherman was long gone by then)

No data for Superman and Spiderman is available in these years...but one thing I am pretty certain of...the X-men were in the process of arriving.


The Legion sales actually went up from the implosion year before.


I am sure some of my fine unbiased Legion brethren will astutely point out that was when the Legion became it's own title and the evidence points to Superboy leaving the Legion as being a sales bonus...however, I will counter with the fact that only happened 3 issues before the circulation statement so it's impact was unlikely to be felt...

More than likely, the improved sales were what lead to DC trying to spin the Legion off as a solo title during an up period. Not to mention putting their traditional best selling character Superboy back in his own title.

As data from the following years will show...removing Superboy most certainly did not help the overall sales of the title.


1980


Legion:
1980 - 130,478
(Source: LOSH #275 May 81)
ERA: Conway Janes/Ditko etc

Spiderman:
1980 - 296,712

Superman:
1980 - 178,946

Various:

Mad Magazine 1,342,640
Amazing Spider-Man 296,712
Incredible Hulk 201,000
X-Men 191,927
Archie Digest Magazine (1981) 141,739
Batman 129,299
Archie circa 100,000


In my estimation, the Legion remained DC's top selling team book for the decade, and was only outsold by Superman and Warlord(allegedly) for th decade. I believe they were only outsold by Spiderman and possibly the FF among Marvel titles for much of the decade. So in my estimation, the Legion was the top 5 book consistently up until the final 3 years of the 70's, at which point it still remained one of DC's top 3 books.


As the 80's dawn...the Legion on it's own for the first time ever, and puts up it's worse circulation numbers ever.

Fear not though...because Paul and Keith are on the way(and Superboy is coming back too).

Thanks, Supes... fascinating (to me anyway) information.

Thanks...that analysis is kind of choppy so I'll summarize it a bit.


Basically I think the only titles that definitely out sold the Legion at Marvel and DC during the years 74-77(and for the decade actually) are Superman and Spiderman, with Archie in the discussion and according to Mike Grell Warlord becoming DC's top seller. I'd bet the farm that Justice League never outsold the Legion in any of those years.

In fact IMO, the Justice League never outsold the Legion until after the COIE when the Giffen League was launched..but that's a discussion for a later era.

As you can see...the X-Men did not pass the Legion as the most popular team until the very end of the 70's, and even when they did, their numbers weren't the blockbusters they would be in the 80s.


All evidence points to the Legion again being the most popular team of the 1970's as they had been in the 1960's. But we'll have to get the numbers for the Justice League, the FF and the Avengers to be certain.


And the Titans? They weren't even on the Legion's radar. In fact they were cancelled.

It's also interesting to note how the DC explosion hurt the sales of the other books...so many titles didn't actually increase the audience IMO, people just spent money normally reserved on DC's big guns on the lesser titles, hurting their better selling titles. At least that's the way it seems to me.

I'd have to see the Marvel numbers for 1979 to be certain though.

Superboy --

The Statement of Ownership for SUPERBOY # 202 is found at the bottom of the ad that precedes page 43.

There are no lines X or Y listed, but the Total Paid Circulation: Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months (line 11C) is 238,992.

LOL lines X and Y were because I couldn't remember what they actually called the lines..they are called like 101b and 101c or something like that. But thanks...I don't even know if my copy of 202 has that, it's in the worst shape of any Legion comics in my collection.


While we're at it...do you have the numbers for Superboy from the years the Legion was the backup? I have all the Legion appearances AFAIK but near as I can tell, the circulation statements didn't appear in any Apr May or June issues featuring the Legion so I don't own any of those issues(and I'll be really surprised if I missed any Legion appearances as well, so please let me know).


Basically the circulation statements appeared in April, May or June issues.


There should be a circulation statement in issue #195 as well, but there isn't, so it might be in issue #194 or 196 if anyone has those issues.

No, I don't have the non-Legion issues, either, except for # 196 (no Statement of Ownership).

Please be precise as to which numbers you want people to look up, as there are several similar categories that can skewer your analysis if the wrong numbers are used.

As you guys are persuing these numbers...keep an eye on what the Archie digest was selling...and then when you get done take a look at these:

Those are the Archie numbers...for 2007.

Yeah lol...I'll be more precise. I need to go get the comics back out of the garage to know exactly which line I want. I am pretty sure just looking at the number you posted that you picked the right line...if you picked the wrong line the circulation numbers would be like 400,000 plus. You number looks about in line with my numbers for 1974.