Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion sales still sliding

I haven't bought any comics since just after the New 52 was introduced so I can't really speak to any quality issues, but - lopping off the titles slated for cancellation - the one thing that absolutely leaps out at me while looking at the above list is just the sheer lack of diversity in the remaining titles.

They are putting so many eggs in the extended Superman, Batman, and JLA baskets that there is barely room for anything else.

I guess what sells, sells, but - sheesh - that is the least amount of selection DC has had in years.

Here's the Legion sales numbers for #19. The downward trend continues, but not as sharply. Have all the marginal fans jumped ship and only the hard core fans remain?

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/25659.html

While sales are down overall, this was the first month that Legion actually sold out at the comic shop I go to before I could pick up my copy. It was weird for them to actually reorder an issue of LSH these days.

Possibly a useful chart. Line shows change, relative to dotted line (no change).

Smallville with a Legion storyline also was unavailable at my shop and that just never happens I was told.

Just to give an impression of LSH sales these past two volumes:


Blue columns/left y-axis = Plain sales numbers
Red line/right y-axis = Relative to Batman sales
Yellow line/right y-axis = Relative to DCU average sales (NB: Based on Marc-Oliver Frisch's averages at The Beat, anti-returnability discount correction not applied since the discount was included)

Wow. v7 #1 sure didn't excite people much.

Pretty soon every issue will be numbered 1!

Including an all new character and/or team ... that dies horribly.

The Bat Super Bat League of Bat ... will be the title of the 52 comics.

I think the yellow line there is *really* telling - LSH went up because, with the DCnU relaunch, EVERYTHING went up, but the trend relative to DCU average sales continued.

Exactly. In fact, there's even a noticeable dip for that issue relative to the DCU average!

And, with things wrapped up, here's the graph.

[Trigger warning.]

I think what we should take away from this is that the NU52 killed the Legion. XD! I mean, volume 6 didn't do GREAT, but it still did better than the vast majority of volume 7.

Note that the green line doesn't intersect with the blue one until around (what would have been) v6 #60, or v7 #43; and that the sales level of v7 #23 (v6 #40) would have been reached by v6 #32 [i.e., v7 #15]

[The R² value, BTW, is a measure of how precisely the trendline matches the data - an R² of 1 is a perfect match, and lower is less good.]

Legion sales are really gonna drop from now on!!!

hardy har har.

However, this measures absolute sales. It's clear that the NewDCU had raised the sales of Legion for a while, but that's only because the NewDCU raised sales for everything for a while. If you measure it as percentage of Batman like some of the earlier graphs, wouldn't the lines cross much earlier, showing that the NewDCU *did* kill the Legion (relative to other DC comics)?

What you have to remember is that sales of Batman NEARLY TREBLED from Batman #713 to N52 Batman #1. And they're still more than double - Batman v1 #713, in August 2011, had North American icv2 estimated orders of 51,760. Batman v2 #23, in August 2013? 128,230.

That makes Batman a very poor metric for comparison - sure, LSH v6 had a higher percentage of Batman v1 than LSH v7 and Batman v2, but that was as much about Batman as anything else.

As a percentage of DCU sales overall,... well, that's the yellow-orange line on the graph up a few posts. The N52 relaunch didn't change that trend by any significant amount - it just kept slipping down.

The big mistake DC made was keeping Paul Levitz and trying to run v6 smoothly into v7. The only other titles that tried anything approaching that were the core Batman and Green Lantern titles, and both of those sets had the sales to back it up, unlike LSH.

Waah wah waaaaaaaahhhhhhh.

Interesting. Thanks for the charts, 'Boot.


Looking at the absolute sales, by issue #9 the v7 series had lost all new readers that were attracted by issue #1. An eyeball of your trendlines also shows (at least it seems to me) that v7 had a steeper downwards curve (lost readers more quickly) than v6 did.