CBR: The Mayo Report: Checking In On DC's New 52

[CBR News]

John Mayo drills down into DC Comics' sales numbers over the first five months of the New 52, analyzes Marvel's diminished sales and looks at the significance of DC sweeping the top ten spots.


Full article here.

[MarvelMaster616]

Nice report as always. I think DC is banking on titles leveling off as DC's reboot drifts further into the past. Level sales are better than declining sales and stable sales go a long ways. They don't have to keep rising Walking Dead style to be successful. I think it's a matter of how much DC's overall titles stabilize compared to Marvel. If they establish themselves and Marvel has to keep playing catch-up, then I can see them doing something drastic down the line. Right now, it all depends on how Avengers vs. X-men pans out. It's a major 12-part event and if it shapes up to be as big as advertised, I can see it and the titles that follow putting a dent in DC's progress. But given how Fear Itself sputtered out, it's not impossible for Avengers vs. X-men to set Marvel back even further in the long run. We'll have to wait and see.

[john dixon]

What an excellent analysis. What should be shocking to me is the way those numbers are plummeting on every title. I certainly expected a big drop off between all # 1 and # 2 issues, especially where the #1's were part of a huge event like "The New 52" but the month to month sales drops after that are absolutely alarming. But I am not shocked because, personally, I am mostly dissatisfied with The New 52. I am buying Superman, Action, Flash, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and JLA. The only issues I actually look forward to every month are Batman and Aquaman. JLA and GL are good, not great. The others are terrible and a chore to read.

I am also not surprised about Marvel. It is clear that Marvel has decided it will not be able to pull in any new readers so it is cannibalizing its existing readership by flooding the market with multiple titles with the same character(s). So now we have two FF titles, two Cap titles (three if you count this new Winter Soldier series), and a ridiculous out of control multiple of Wolverine, X-Men, and Avengers titles. I dropped all the X-Men titles and all the Wolverines as well and if they don't cut down the # of Avengers titles, I will drop those as well.

[Ari Gold]

Scott McDaniels posted something really interesting recently, though it may have been lost in the rest of his post related to his experiences writing Static Shock.

His analysis over years & years of data is that a series will lose 40% of it's sales from issue #1 to issue #6, and 60% by the time it hits #12. It seems pretty remarkable, but I just picked a bunch of series that had launched in recent years and for the most part it seemed to hold true.