Mayo Report for 2011-06

Mayo Report: 2011-06 Comics
podcast episode

Mayo Report: 2011-06 Trades
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June 2011 was another month of generally low sales with "Ultimate Spider-Man" #160 being the notable exception. The news coverage of the death of that Spider-Man resulted in a tripling of sales for the issue over the previous issue. Other than that, once again nothing cracked 100,000 units. "Fear Itself" #3 came close with an estimated 95,621 units while "Flashpoint" #2 wasn't far behind with around 87,505 units. While the core titles for the two major events were near the top of the charts, the sales of the related miniseries were not.

While it felt like half of the comics released by Marvel were Fear Itself tie-ins, the sales of comics with Fear Itself in the actual title of the miniseries were unimpressive. "Fear Itself: Spider-Man" #2 topped that list of titles with only 30,238 units and "Fear Itself: Youth in Revolt" #2 was at the bottom with around 20,376 units. The average sales of 24,543 is about 25% of the sales of "Fear Itself" #3.

"Flashpoint: Batman, Knight of Vengeance" #1 was the top selling of the Flashpoint related titles with about 45,129 units which is around 52% of the sales of "Flashpoint" #2. The lowest selling of the Flashpoint related titles was "Flashpoint: The Canterbury Cricket" #1 with an estimated 22,948 units. Those are impressive sales for a title featuring a new character and an unknown storyline. What is a bit surprising is that the second lowest of the Flashpoint related issues was "Booster Gold" #45 with only 26,183 units. While that is an increase of over 12% from the previous issue which was also a Flashpoint tie in, it is only about 10,000 units higher than the title has been doing prior to the Flashpoint event. "Booster Gold" is the only ongoing monthly title to tie into Flashpoint and even that failed to increase sales to the level of all but the lowest of the Flashpoint one-shots and miniseries. For those of you wondering why "Booster Gold" isn't one of the DC 2.0 titles, here is your answer. Overall, the Flashpoint related titles averaged sales of around 33,240 units.

The chart topping sales of the event titles combined with the low sales of the secondary miniseries titles for those same events indicates the problem isn't event fatigue but event oversaturation. Readers are still interested in events themselves. What they don't seem interested in is following the adventures of each and every character in the universe during those events. While this tactic of secondary miniseries worked well for Marvel with "Civil War," the continued use of it in every event since then has leached the sales power out of it.

The sales of the top selling ongoing titles were weak, topping out at approximately 64,057 units for "Avengers" #14. The next best-selling ongoing title was "FF" #5 with around 58,925 units. Both of those titles launched well about the 100,000 unit marks with "Avengers" #1 selling around 170,682 units and "FF" #1 selling around 121,172 units. The top ongoing title for DC was "Batman Incorporated" #7 with an estimated 56,108 units. The first issue of that title sold about 95,587 units.


Order index data provided courtesy of Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. and used with permission.

For additional comic book sales information, check out The Comic Chronicles.

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