Thursday, January 04, 2007

Lies, damn lies, and statistics (part 2 of 3): Legion sales

Next up in my numerical trio of posts is a look at sales of the Legion book(s). I've been doing this every few months since last April, where I first took a look at 10 years worth of sales (see here for all of the analysis).

Yes, unfortunately, sales are still falling. There was a huge spike at the "One Year Later" issue and then a smaller one with the Adam Hughes variant cover, but still declining nonetheless. The silver lining is that sales are still higher than they were ten years ago.

First, a look at sales on the Legion of Super-Heroes (v5) and Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes comic. (Click to enlarge). Recent data comes from Marc-Oliver Frisch's sales data at The BEAT.

It looks to me like sales will level off around the 30K mark.



Now for the big picture: sales over the last 10 years.



Sales of the current series have dropped far faster than at any point in the last 10 years, but as I mentioned, they're still higher than at any point in the last 10 years. Compare the current book with the most recent book prior to the new reboot, The Legion. Read my first post in my sales analysis for what was going on prior to the current reboot.

I'd like to take the data earlier than 1996, does anyone have or know how to get at the data relatively easy?

3 comments:

Mr. Kayak said...

i can't believe they rebooted the whole franchise just to get, in the end, 5000 more readers... couldn't they just change the creative team with one more appealing to the readers?

Anonymous said...

I think the reason for the reboot is the continuing myth that "the Legion continuity is too complicated for a new reader to ever understand, so they will not try the book." That's what caused the last reboot (when, to be honest, it might have been a bit less of a myth after the TMK years), and I'm guessing that's why DC excercised the "LSH nuclear option" and went forward with this one.

Me, I'm still hoping for "All Star Legion," taking us back to a pre-Magic Wars team. Well, I can hope, can't I? ;-)

Anonymous said...

Well, it was certainly a myth with the last reboot. Hell, right now you need a degree in DC history to even make a vaguely informed GUESS at Wonder Woman's history post-Infinite Crisis...