What the Cavemen read... (part 1)

From 1979 to 1982, THE COMIC READER, under editor Michael Tiefenbacher and publisher Jerome Sinkovec, ran a regular chart based on survey reports from comic shops on what was selling in their stores. The first one ran in #169, the June 1979 issue, and reported on books on sale in March 1979, with about 20 stores reporting (and given the tools available in that day, I give them credit for getting it done that fast). For some reason Archie and Harvey comics weren't included (they would be in later charts), so there are only 93 entries, from Marvel, DC, Gold Key, Warren, Charlton and Heavy Metal.

By the way, I think stores were responding with their sell-through numbers (actual sales to customers) and not their sell-in (their purchases from their distributors, the numbers the current Diamond charts represent), but I'm not 100% sure.

Here's a fairly complete list of books published that month.  And no, your eyes are not playing tricks, there really were that many RICHIE RICH titles published at once. In fact, since most of them were bi-monthly, there were actually almost twice as many individual titles.

There's little real value to any of the data, being a self-selected sample of stores that report, and at the time the nascent specialist comic store being just a small fraction of the market (based on most figures I've seen, this probably represents less than 1% of the sales for most of these books, far less for some of them), but they're still an interesting snapshot of that market.

As you can see, Marvel pretty much owned this section of the market.  You have to go down to #21 before you get a DC book, and I'll bet almost no one would be able to guess that that DC book would be WARLORD.  And that handily outsold the second DC book, at #29, DC COMICS PRESENTS, which puts it below every non-reprint standard sized comic Marvel was publishing (GHOST RIDER at #27 being the lowest of those).

The licensed books were tops at Marvel for this market, with four of the top six entries, with X-MEN being the top Marvel Universe book.

The DC books are pretty much ranked as you'd expect except for WARLORD up top. The main super-hero books, fairly tightly clustered with WONDER WOMAN last, followed by a mix of the western, war and mystery books, with SUPER FRIENDS mixed in with those.

HEAVY METAL at #31 is the first entry not from DC or Marvel.  And given it was $1.50 when most of the higher entries were $0.40, it might have been near the top in total dollar sales, along with the $1 SAVAGE SWORD and $1.50 MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL that placed higher. The $2 tabloid sized MARVEL TREASURY EDITIONS were probably also bringing in as much for these stores as the top sellers.

Gold Key first shows up at #47, with WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES.  There's quite a spread on their sales, not surprisingly the books likely to have Barks reprints way up on the other stuff, except the recently revived FLASH GORDON comic which also does relatively well. And, in the "things I did not know" department, there was a HAPPY DAYS comic.

The Warren black-and-white magazines are pretty tightly clustered. And very clearly this segment of the market has no interest in Charlton, which was by now pretty much entirely publishing reprints. The bottom ten entries are the Charlton line, with the top book selling less than half the next worst seller. They'll pretty much drop off the list once the Archie and Harvey titles are listed.

And one thing kind of sticks out compared to today. Check out how many first issues were published that month.  None. In fact, there are only a handful of books in single digits. It wouldn't be long before being a #1 was seen as a positive.