More back issues than we think?

[gentlesatirist]

Checking out some circ #s at the wonderful comichron.com site and noticed that issues of mid-level comics like Metal Men were averaging sales of 200,000 copies per issue in the mid-1960s.

So let's assume that in the intervening 40 years, 75 percent of those issues were somehow destroyed, because of their disposable nature or just the natural process that happens to 40-year-old products made of cheap paper.

That means there could be 50,000 copies of these titles out there - much more than the average monthly comic sells today - but are there really 50,000 collectors out there who want every issue of Metal Men from the 1960s?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here and raising a point about supply and demand. Who knows - maybe as mich as 90 percent of those 200k have disappeared from the earth - but maybe it's only 50 percent. Any thoughts?


- FE
Wickliffe OH

[Lone Ranger]

It's very difficult to get a good sense of what's actually out there.

The Gerber Scarcity Index gives a sense of the numbers of Golden Age books in existence, but in my opinion it's pretty flawed and based on best guesstimates.

I see some books with a 6 or 7 on eBay fairly often, but some with a 3 or 4 never show up.

If you read through the market reports from Dealers in the Overstreet Guide (I often really enjoy these), you hear over and over about how much more readily avaible Silver Bronze Age Marvels are than DCs (at least in high grade), I don't know if there's much empirical evidence to support this, but I read about that all of the time.

I miss the old Market Reports in Comic Book Marketplace, because they often discussed scarcity.

CGC has tried its best by creating census numbers from books submitted to it, but this isn't the best barometer as some books are simply more likely to be submitted than others (There are 33 Action Comics #1, but only 5 Metal Men #16) - so you're not getting very useful info.

It's too bad no one has thought to track eBay sales (although you'd often see the same books moving) because it's probably the best way of sorting out how many issues of specific books are out there. Currently there are 4 auctions featuring Metal Men #16 and 11 stores with the issue for sale. There is only one Action Comics #1 for sale right now (it's cross listed with Heritage Auctions).

[Red Oak Kid]

While the statements of ownership and circulation are interesting, I would hesitate to use these figures to try and draw any hard conclusions. The companies only printed them because they were required to, and I suspect the numbers could be manipulated by the company to say or not say anything they wanted. Call me a cynic, but I doubt if any company would publish any information that would be of any use to a competitor. So I think these numbers are probably not very truthful.

I think of them the same way I think of the gas mileage figures that are printed on the windows of new cars. Real world mpg never matches the ones on the window. Actual mpg is always lower than the ones posted. These numbers are only useful for comparison purposes.

So I decided to breakdown the circulation figures on a random comic. I found one in World's Finest #302 April 1984. However the actual filing date is October 1,1983. There are two sets of figures: The average of the 12 months prior to Oct. 1983 and the month nearest the filing date. But they don't tell you the month nearest to filing date. So I have decided to use the average number from the previous 12 months. And you should always keep in mind this is an average number This is problem #1. This figure covers a period of one year so there could be a big difference between the sales of say, the Feb 1983 issue of WF and the July 1983 issue. We are only seeing an average so it would be impossible to say what the sales of any specific month was. And remember they don't tell you the exact issue that is the one nearest the filing date, so those numbers cannot be connected to a specific month of WF.

Average press run: 211,892.

Average paid circulation: 88,234
Average mail subscriptions: 694
Average free circulation: 701

These three numbers add up to 89,629. So this is a yearly average of how many copies of WF per month, got into the hands of a reader in 1983. This number is less than half of the copies actually printed. But this is just an average so this number could vary from month to month.

Now it gets interesting.

Copies Not Distributed:

Average copies spoiled and or lost after printing: 1,562
Average copies returned by news agents: 120,701

Wow. The average number of copies returned as unsold is greater than the total number of copies sold or given away(89,629). How does DC comics even stay in business? They paid the printer to print 211,892 copies of a comic. They sold only 88,928 copies. AND they had to reimburse the news agents for the 120,701 copies that they "claim" did not sell even tho they were put out on the stands(if you believe the the news agents). Btw, we don't know if these "returns" were actually returned. There is a good chance that some of these unsold copies were actually sold out the back door of the distributor's warehouse.

This is why I don't put much stock in these figures, because on the surface, they don't make much business sense. So I would use them only for comparison purposes to other circulation statements from other years. And only to compare a title from year to year since it is impossible to break these numbers down to a known month.

[MDG]

Wow. The average number of copies returned as unsold is greater than the total number of copies sold or given away(89,629). How does DC comics even stay in business? They paid the printer to print 211,892 copies of a comic. They sold only 88,928 copies. AND they had to reimburse the news agents for the 120,701 copies that they "claim" did not sell even tho they were put out on the stands(if you believe the the news agents). Btw, we don't know if these "returns" were actually returned. There is a good chance that some of these unsold copies were actually sold out the back door of the distributor's warehouse.

I'm no expert, but this was the newsstand system, and "sellthrough" was always an issue. Even in silver age books, some of the publisher's statements only show 50% or so of the printed books were sold--"sold" meaning that DC was paid for them. I think at different points in the business, 33% sellthrough meant a book was doing well.

I'm wondering about the 1983 timeframe, though. At that time, the direct market was still expanding, and the deal with the direct market was that there were no returns. LCSs bought the books and they either sold off the stands or went into the back issue bins. Were these counted as part of the paid circulation, or was that just what went to newsstand distributors?

I'm sure someone here was working at a comics store at the time and has some insight.

MDG

[gentlesatirist]

...count as paid circulation. That's how the monthly titles have survived in spite of much smaller readerships. They now have sell-through rates of almost 100 percent, so they can have much smaller press runs. Your local shop is stuck with any comic that doesn't sell.

Of course, in the current market, a publisher does cartwheels if any comic sells 100k per month - or half of what Metal Men was selling in the mid-1960s.

As for the allegation that the #s might not be accurate, if anything they'd be reported too high, to scare the competition and to increase ad rates.

And if you believe the assertion that a lot of comics reported as unsold were sold out the back door of many places, that would only increase the size of the pool of back issues.


- FE

[Red Oak Kid]

I'm certainly no expert either. I had the same thought as MDG about the direct market. I wonder if the circulation statements are telling the whole story in the direct market age. For some reason I am under the impression that companies were required to publish these circulation statements in order to retain their 2nd class postage rates. Books sent directly to an LCS wouldn't reallly require the 2nd class status so maybe the press run for the direct sales market is different from the press run of the newstand comics and is not included in the published circulation figures. In other words a press run for newstand and subscription sales which is required by law to be published and another press run for direct sales which is not published.


...As for the allegation that the #s might not be accurate, if anything they'd be reported too high, to scare the competition and to increase ad rates.

If DC is inflating their numbers then it's safe to assume the other publishers are inflating their own numbers and therefore would know these published figures are as worthless as their own. You can't kid a kidder. And I think just the opposite would be true. Suppose DC had a book titled Beeman and it was setting all kinds of sales records. They would not want Marvel to know this because Marvel would come out with their own version of Beeman and possibly cut into DC's sales. So it would be to DC's advantage to under report sales.

Concerning ad rates, I would assume that the publisher's used some other figures when trying to get advertisers. I think this is why the circulation figures published in the comics were in such a tiny typeface and sometimes published sideways, where you had to turn the book 90 degrees and use a magnifying glass to read them.

If the numbers really are inflated then it would mean there are less copies in the potential back issue pool.

Which all goes back to my original contention that it is nearly impossible to draw any conclusions from these figures because they are so suspect.

[T GUy]

gentlesatirist,

Checking out some circ #s at the wonderful comichron.com site and noticed that issues of mid-level comics like Metal Men were averaging sales of 200,000 copies per issue in the mid-1960s.

was that here on the wibbly-wobbly web? (http://www.comichron.com/YearlyRankings/tabid/158/Default.aspx)

In 1964, Metal Men was reporting sales of 295,513; the 1966 figure rose to 396,506.

To outsell that, you had to be one of the Batman or Superman titles - or Archie.

I would not have imagined that the Metal Men was such a high seller - or, indeed, that only one Archie comic and none of Gold Key's Disney books outsold it.

[gentlesatirist]

...would lower your ad rate, same as low TV ratings lower ad rates and lead to cancellation. That's why an ad played during the Super Bowl costs more than one placed during the WNBA playoffs, for example.

Of course, we're talking about an ad market dominated by the makers of joy buzzers and x-ray spex, so maybe it didn't matter all that much.

Just kidding - a little. By the mid-60s, some then-major toy companies like Aurora and Ideal were advertising. Plus the TV networks dropped some serious coin once a year to hype their new Saturday morning lineups. By the 70s, you could add name companies like Hostess pastries, Daisy rifles and Spalding sporting goods to the mix.

These were real companies, so you couldn't just have your ad guy say "Yeah, last year we sold about 175,000 per title, but this year, we're up to 200,000, so we have to charge you more for the ad. Trust us." There had to be something tangible there. So maybe these things actually got more accurate as time went on.


- FE

[Red Oak Kid]

You're right. Harry Donenfeld and Martin Goodman would never lie about their sales figures. What was I thinking?;)

[Rob Allen]

I think there might be more accurate sales figures available in the archives of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, but I'm under the impression that they're difficult to get into and may have only aggregate figures by publisher.

[MWGallaher]

...would lower your ad rate, same as low TV ratings lower ad rates and lead to cancellation. That's why an ad played during the Super Bowl costs more than one placed during the WNBA playoffs, for example.


But comic book ads ran line-wide (although there may have been some exceptions for gender-specific ads in romance comics). So if DC wanted to hide the theoretically exceptional Metal Men sales, for example (out of fear that Marvel might introduce a team of robot heroes), they could subtract a few thousand sales from MM and inflate Superman by the same amount, thus continuing to claim a high enough overall sales rate to attract advertisers. Because noone's going to question that Superman circa 1964 has very high sales, right?

[Red Oak Kid]

I ran across this ad today. It is from Brave and Bold 65, May of 1966.

http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q144/redoakkid/adcadd0001.jpg

I find the second claim somewhat difficult to believe.

It would mean DC was selling almost as many comics as Marvel, Archie, Harvey, Gold Key, Charlton and possibly others, combined.

I guess it depends on DC's definition of the word "almost".

[gentlesatirist]

...DC might have even been counting Marvel's sales, especially if they were still distributing Marvel's comics at that time as they once were, when Marvel/Atlas almost was blinked out of existence.


- FE

[gentlesatirist]

...I'm just saying that when "real" companies - the conglomerates that ruled the American business landscape in the 60s and 70s - wanted to advertise, they weren't going to fork over a big check based on what a publisher said their sales were. There had to be some documentation to justify the expense.

Like I said, it wasn't all joy buzzers and x-ray spex and Charles Atlas and 100 army men for a dollar anymore.


- FE

[MWGallaher]

My hunch is that the numbers may not have been accurate but that they were probably genuinely representative. Mac's observation that they don't appear to make business sense would suggest that DC wasn't significantly fudging their numbers. If less than 50% sellthrough really looked bad to advertisers, it seems like they'd alter that if they really felt like they could get away with it. I'd assume advertisers--at least the big ones--had their own marketing specialists who could interpret those numbers and figure out whether they added up to a profitable enterprise. And we can only assume that it was a profitable enterprise, otherwise the comics would have gone under long before.

[Red Oak Kid]

Regarding the ad above from 1966, I just remembered that this would have been during the high water mark of the Batman tv craze, so the claim in the ad may have been based on the sales spike of the Batman title(s). Even so, I still think DC was stretching the truth.

[Citizen V]

I would think that comics from 1994 and before,have plenty of issues.Why?I heard once that because of the large sales numbers,Marvel and DC printed vast amounts of comics.After the comic book bubble popped in 1998,readers dropped..and there were too many issues.So numbers of comic issues got smaller.

[MichikoS]

A propos to this thread, I was re-reading a CBA interview with Dick Giordano tonight, and stumbled across this little gem:

CBA: How did you know if your books were selling?

Dick: In those days we didn't have sales figures given to us as we did in later years. Every editor had a cork board with their books' cover proofs pinned up. Sometime during the night, Carmine or somebody would turn over the cover and write a figure down for that particular title. It wasn't numbers but a percentage, but we weren't given the print run numbers so we never knew how many we sold. I didn't pay too much attention to the numbers because I had no way of comparing them to anything that made sense to me. They dropped Strange Adventures with Deadman when it was selling 125,000 copies and that wasn't enough to keep it going.
I wouldn't take the Publisher's Statement numbers to church. I'm not sure where they came from but I'll tell you one thing I know for sure -- because I can't get in trouble. At Charlton, they just made them up.

Michi

[Red Oak Kid]

A propos to this thread, I was re-reading a CBA interview with Dick Giordano tonight, and stumbled across this little gem:

CBA: How did you know if your books were selling?

Dick: In those days we didn't have sales figures given to us as we did in later years. Every editor had a cork board with their books' cover proofs pinned up. Sometime during the night, Carmine or somebody would turn over the cover and write a figure down for that particular title. It wasn't numbers but a percentage, but we weren't given the print run numbers so we never knew how many we sold. I didn't pay too much attention to the numbers because I had no way of comparing them to anything that made sense to me. They dropped Strange Adventures with Deadman when it was selling 125,000 copies and that wasn't enough to keep it going.
I wouldn't take the Publisher's Statement numbers to church. I'm not sure where they came from but I'll tell you one thing I know for sure -- because I can't get in trouble. At Charlton, they just made them up.

Michi

Thanks for posting that. I had read that interview, but had forgotten this gem.

I think it supports my theory that the numbers in the Publisher's Statement are highly suspect and it would be an exercise in futility to draw any conclusions based on them.

On the Ka-Zar 1970 thread, Mark Evanier said something that I think would fit into this thread concerning how advertising rates were arrived at by the comic book publishers:

But also at the time, Marvel was trying to keep its monthly volume of sales high for advertisers. Back then, if you bought an ad in Marvel Comics, your ad appeared in every comic published in one month and you were guaranteed that number would total a certain number. (I think, in 1970, it was something like six million.) So if Marvel had, say, 15 comics in a month and sales dropped a little on each, they'd rush out a reprint book so that the 16 comics would total over six million total copies sold in the month. Even if the new comic didn't make a profit, it had a value to them in that sense.

I think we can safely assume that DC used this method as well.