Legion sales data talk part 1: 1960s to mid-1980s

Back in 2018, I posted a long Twitter thread that talked about Legion sales data from the Adventure days of the 1960s up through the Baxter run in the mid-1980s. I meant to expand on it here but never got to it. By now we've got a few issues of sales data on the new series as well, so I'll look at mid-80s through today (mid-2020) here in part 2.

In the olden days, sales data was presented in the comics in the Statement of Ownership, which was required for periodicals being sent through the mail and was printed once a year, and showed the average number of copies of each issue printed over the calendar year. With the rise of the direct market in the mid-80s, this information stopped being available.

For this chart, I took the "average number of issues printed" value from the Statement of Ownership and looked at DC's two flagship characters (Superman and Batman) in their self-titled books, plus the JLA as the flagship team book, plus whatever book the Legion was in at the time (as noted in Column F). Note that DC didn't publish the data for 1963 and 1964. Big caveat though: these are annual averages, so the numbers (assuming they’re true) might be misleading and will miss big peaks and valleys that would be more informative (that will come back to bite me later). Of course, DC had each issue's sales numbers, but those have not yet been made public.

Looking at the data, the green is the highest of those four books each year, and orange is the lowest. The giant spike in 1966 is from the Batman TV show, and you can see how that raised all sales, but after the show was over comics had a slow and steady decline across the board. Of the four titles, JLA was consistently the lowest seller until 1974, trading back and forth with Batman before he takes the bottom spot. And from 1960-1982, Superman was consistently the top seller (except for the 2 years when the Batman show was on).

But in 1983, the Levitz/Giffen Legion book was indeed the top seller (of these four, I didn't look at line-wide sales). And the first year of Tales was also at the top. Unfortunately, sales data isn't available (as far as I know) for the first year of the Baxter v3 run, but the first data point I have (issue #10) has sales of 176k, meaning the early issues of the series were over 200k. In the 1983 DC Sampler #1, Paul Levitz wrote that sales "during the last year" had shot up by 50k (see page 1 panel 2 below). You can see that’s not reflected in the data, so that’s probably due to the annual averages I mentioned earlier. But at this point, I’m just looking at ballparks and trends.

The next problem I have is that after this, data is sparse and fuzzy from 1985-95. I’ve found sales numbers from Capital Cities, one of the two big distributors at the time, listing what percentage of the total DC market share was carried by them. While it’s great to know that in 1986 they had 9.1% and it jumped to 15.5% in 1987, that’s not necessarily a flat rate for every title every month of that year, and since we only have annual data, there's a discontinuity in the plot between the December and January data points.

I asked John Jackson Miller, who literally wrote the book on sales data (make sure it's the 4th edition from 2005), "the catalog lists Capital Cities’ share of the market for DC from 1985-88, but the catalog lists CC data through 1995. What is DC’s market share via CC from 1989-95?" He replied: "We don't know, because I got those ratios by comparing with DC's overall sales as seen in its postal data filings. DC stopped filing postal data reports in 1988 -- so no market shares are possible using that technique."

Anecdotally, The New Teen Titans and the Legion were DC’s top two books in the early 1980s, with Titans at 2x Legion sales and Legion at 2x the next biggest seller, but unfortunately I can’t find any Titans sales data for the entire series before it went to Baxter like the Legion did.

And for some perspective, here are some Statement of Ownership numbers from 1981-83:

• Dazzler - 296k, 167k, 135k 
• Superman - 149k, 140k, 126k. 

Marvel was kicking DC's butt in the 80s; Marvel's then Editor in Chief Jim Shooter (yes, that Jim Shooter) said anything that sold under 100k was cancelled, while at DC only Titans & Legion were selling more than 100k.

For sales data, I am indebted to John Jackson Miller and his Comichron.com website, which is still trying to locate the missing data from not only the 1980s-90s but also individual issue data for the 1960s-80s.