Daily Comics Digression #45: An Important Distinction

When it comes to discussing the success of a particular market, the concept of sales gets thrown around quite a bit. Unfortunately, simply looking at sales for the comic book industry can be quite misleading. There's a couple of things to keep in mind when discussing the sales of comics.

Sales, as listed on sites like Comichron, do not tell the full story. The stats on a site like this one are not precise, and are more akin to a rough estimate of how many comics have been ordered by comic book retailers. More importantly, however, is the fact that these numbers do not reflect the sell-through to the consumer. Simply put, just because a store buys it doesn't mean it was actually bought by a customer. Many of the discount bins at comic book stores are filled with comics that no one was interested in due to store owners being beguiled into ordering them by the bucket load because Marvel or DC pronounced they would be a hit. Further adding to this problem is the fact that digital sales are unlisted, and comic book companies may over-ship a comic, even if it wasn't ordered. One can quickly see how arriving at a precise figure for the reach and impact of a title is not only difficult, it seems to be opaque by design, allowing for a failing comic to appear successful and diffracting the attention of anyone trying to figure out otherwise.

It is also important to note that while sales for comics can go up or down in terms of total dollars spent by consumers, that does not mean that the industry is healthy or even solvent. I'm not even talking about the difference between gross profit and net; one need only look at the unit sales for the entire industry to see how far comics has fallen. Now, from what I've seen, the state of ordered units of comics to shops is not as low as it was in 2001 or 2011, but the trend does not seem to be highly positive as a whole. For further confirmation, one can see that titles like Spider-Man could sell through something like three hundred thousand comics to consumers some years ago, and now the orders to the shops for the same title seem to be about a sixth of that. So it may seem that sales in dollars are doing well until you realize that the reason for this is because comic books are becoming increasingly expensive. 

Ultimately, the audience for comics must grow, or the sales numbers will finally collapse the whole house of cards. As some pundits have already stated, superheroes have never had the amount of cultural capital they have presently. Infinity War will easily make two billion worldwide, yet the comic book industry seems unable to use this popularity to increase the reach of its publications.