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

Another way of looking at it:

v6 #1-- 44415 x $4 = $177,660
v5 #1-- 59944 x $3 = $179,982

Compared to other DC titles only, LSH V6#1 is ranked #16 in the DC titles.

Shooter's first issue (issue 37, sales for December 2007) was ranked #21 among DC titles only.

The first Supergirl issue (issue 16, sales for March 2006) was ranked #16 among DC only. The ranking doesn't take reorders into consideration. Using reorders and assuming nothing else has reorders that affect the listing, it would be #34 overall and #13 among DC.

V5#1 was #10 among DC only.

You forgot inflation, so we have:

v6 #1-- 44415 x $4 = $177,660
v5 #1-- 59944 x $3 = $204,117 (in 2010 dollars)

One thing to consider is that in all of Paul's interviews he's mentioned he realizes the Legion has not been a top-seller for 20+ years and so he knows its his job to make it that way. One can only hope his intentions--of building sales over time--can come to fruition. Probably Green Lantern is the only DC title/franchise to do that in the last 10 years.

All we know is that the #1 has the Legion right back where we were before. That's not too surprising. How many #1 issues and relaunches can you release in 15 years? "Fool me once, shame on me" and all that.

If #1 sold out and had the second printing, one can hope DC will print more the second issue. Hopefully that sells out too. And then by #6 release the Legion flight ring to give a faux sales bump.

May Numbers are in and as others have mentioned Legion of Super-Heroes #1 comes in at a solid, but not setting the world on fire, 44K. The question is, where does it go from here?

05/2010: Legion of Super-Heroes #1 -- 44,415, #39 out of 300


Adventure meanwhile takes a hit after the end of the crossover (though really, this issue ties up a lot of loose ends from not only the Crossover but the whole Robinson run with the characters). Paul Levitz now has a 34K launchpad to work with for the secondary title.

08/2009: Adventure Comics #1 -- 56,706, #30 out of 300
09/2009: Adventure Comics #2 -- 47,296, #44 out of 300
10/2009: Adventure Comics #3 -- 44,431 #40 out of 300
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

(* denotes no Legion content)

Anecdotally, when I got to my shop last night, #2 had sold out and they only had a couple of the #1 reprints left.

Diamond released their top 100 for June. It will be a while for the ICV2 estimates, but LSH came in at #43 (37.33% of Batman) and Adventure came in at #55 (33.09% of Batman). The tricky bit is that Batman is an anniversary issue this month (#700) and therefore it's harder to estimate sales on the fly.

Looking at the issues around it (JSA, Deadpool, Ultimate Sipdey), it looks like LSH #2 remained pretty consistent, remarkable for a second issue. I'd ballpark it a little above 40K.

That doesn't mean it stayed consistent, since we don't know the *actual* sales for #1 including reorders. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just as sharp a decline as a #2 usually gets.

June numbers are in and as a nice surprise LSH #1 recharts this month adding another 5,691 copies sold, putting #1 over 50K. #2 comes in just under 40K, which isn't a bad drop off considering first month sales (higher obviously when the additional orders are included). It will be interesting to see if there's re-order activity on #2.

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

Adventure, meanwhile, stays pretty much where it was, shedding about 100 readers from the previous team. The question becomes what will be the retention level here? Atom back-ups also start soon, so Brightest Day branding may impact future sales as well.

08/2009: Adventure Comics #1 -- 56,706, #30 out of 300
09/2009: Adventure Comics #2 -- 47,296, #44 out of 300
10/2009: Adventure Comics #3 -- 44,431 #40 out of 300
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

(* denotes no Legion content)

LSH V5#1: 59944
LSH V5#2: 48584
Drop: 18.9%

LSH V5#16(Supergirl and the Legion): 54826
LSH V5#17: 47697
Drop: 13.0%

LSH V5#37 (Shooter run starts): 45803
LSH V5#38: 33045
Drop: 27.9%

Legion of Three Worlds #1: 68306
Legion of Three Worlds #2: 64412
Drop: 5.7%

Adventure #1: 56706
Adventure #2: 47296
Drop: 16.6%

LSH V6#1: 50106
LSH V6#2: 39102
Drop: 22.0%

Definitely not a small drop, although reorders for #2 could change this. And it's still less than the first V5 and the first Supergirl (though it now beats the first Shooter).

Diamond has released thier top 100 for July and LSH charts at #45 (@48 % of Batman #701) while Adventure charts at #63 (40.4 % of Batman). The top 300 and ICV2's estimates are later in the month, so the sepculation for now is how much did Batman move in July?

Educated guesses so far put Legion at around 37K and Adventure closer to 32K.

Has anyone any idea what sales levels will be needed for DC to not mess with/cancel the LSH or Adventure titles?

In the DCU (Wildstorm & Vertigo have different criterea), books have plummeted to the low teens and sometimes lower before getting the axe. Of course, there are other factors as well. For example, different creative teams presumably have different page rates which affect how profitable a book is.

Shooter's run ended at about 22000, and must have been cancelled while it was higher than that--#46 is almost 25000 and beats most of the reboot post-1997. (And at that point it was already feeling the effects of having the retroboot start to come out at the same time.)

I don't know if that actually would be sufficient to cancel most books or if it's just DC internal politics.

It's odd that V6 looks better by ranking than by numbers. #1 (with reorders) would be #31. #2 is 43 and #3 is 45. By numbers all three issues are doing considerably worse than the first three Supergirl/LSH, but by rankings they're all better than Supergirl/LSH. V5 #1-3 is still better than them, however.

don't forget the economy in general. comics are more likely to be trimmed in tight times than food, gas or any number of necessities. less overall comics sales = a smaller overall pie; similar %s before and during equate to lower numbers.

Chart placement in general isn't a great indicator of success as any given month Marvel or DC flood the market with one-shots, events, tie-ins, etc. so 43rd one month could easily have been 33rd the next.

As to the sales level, the bar is definitely getting lower, as the Red Cirlce books were down to almost 10K before cancellation and REBELS and Doom Patrol aren't that far from that point now. As I said a few posts above, economics may be different for different books, but where LSH and Adventure both have "newer" artists, I think there's a lot of rope left.

If the bar is that low, then why did the Threeboot get cancelled? It didn't sell that poorly at all by these standards, it started higher than V6, and the first Supergirl issue again started higher than V6. And it beat the reboot handily. It ended low, but only after the retroboot cannibalized its sales, and it still didn't end at as low as 10000.

Don't forget, sell-through(% of initial monthly orders sold) is important too. That's a big reason why some lower selling titles aren't cancelled, as explained to me by my CBS' owner.

Sorry for sounding dumb lil'rhino but can you explain this a little more please.

thanks

You basically answered that: retroboot killed it.

rhino refers to the amount of books that a title actually sells through at the store is higher for the lower ordered books than the others.

Meaning the CBS owner is not sitting with a ton of product on the shelves for these (lesser produced) titles as the hardcore fans eat them up quickly, but he has to buy extra Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. titles for the walls and bins for the casual and the occasional cross-promotion buyers.

So ordering a few issues of R.E.B.E.L.S. is just instant profit and the popular titles are both short-term and long-term profit (if they ever push them out the door for cover price). The popular titles are more of a risk long-term.

But because comics (mostly) aren't returnable to the distributor, Diamond (and ultimately DC and Marvel), don't really care about or track sell-through. Their numbers reflect what they sell to their clients: the stores in the Direct Market.

What those stores do with the books (sell them, leave them on the shelf, mark them up, mark them down, etc.), is largely irrelevant to them. Presumably stores course correct by adjusting their orders over time ('Wow, no one's buying Mega Crossover tie-in #82. I'd better order 20 copies less of #85 or I'll eat them'), and those numbers are important to publishers, but the bottom line in analyzing these numbers are what the stores buy in bulk from Diamond.

There's been talk for years about how cool a point-of-sale system would be to track what people are really buying, but there's really no benefit to the Publishers or distributor to do this if the model remains as is.

Sales are now out, and are pretty much as expected. No reorders though. 39102 to 36360 is a 7% decline. It is below #8 of the threeboot, and below the #7 Supergirl issue. It is still above all of the reboot from 1997-onwards and still above all except #1 of the Shooter issues.

The sales figures posted many pages earlier in this thread don't quite go back as far as possible. Diamond started being the exclusive distributor as of September 1996, so we can add 7 more months to that list (from www.chron.com).

Legionnaires #42 - 25391
Legion of Super-Heroes #86 - 33130
Legionnaires #43 - 27299
Legion of Super-Heroes #87 - 27789
Legionnaires #44 - 26169
Legion of Super-Heroes #88 - 28864
Legionnaires #45 - 25835
Legion of Super-Heroes #89 - 27495
Legionnaires #46 - 25693
Legion of Super-Heroes #90 - 27286
Legionnaires #47 - 25489
Legion of Super-Heroes #91 - 26961
Legionnaires #48 - 25547
Legion of Super-Heroes #92 - 26696

I haven't been able to find any Capital City sales information on the web (I guess you can't find everything on the Internet).

Later figures are still at this link for the reboot and this link for the threeboot .

V6 #3 still beats all these figures.

Omnicom did a graph, but the last time they did it was in the Shooter run, which is here. They also did a graph for the entire lifetime of the Legion which can be found here but unfortunately there is no presentation of the 1994-1996 sales as numbers so it's really hard to tell how well the reboot did.

Thanks Nightcrawler. I understand that now but don't see why stores making more money stops DC cancelling it?