What the Cavewomen read... (part 2)

After their inaugural Top 100 in #169, THE COMIC READER (editor: Michael Tiefenbacher publisher: Jerome Sinkovec) continued running the feature monthly.  It would be a bit much to comment on every one, so here's the chart from exactly one year after the first one, representing books on sale in March 1980, as published in TCR #181. Here's a partial list of comics released that month.

There are considerably more and different stores responding to the survey this time around, so you can't really compare the actual numbers. Remember, these are 34 year old numbers from a small self-selected sample of a small fraction of the market, so please, no wagering.

That Letterman reference is almost as old as these numbers...

As you can see, Archie and Harvey are listed this time, which had the result of knocking anything from Charlton and Gold Key off the Top 100.  All of their books are clustered at the bottom of the list, from #72 to #100 (with only Marvel black-and-white magazine CRAZY from other publishers in that range) with close to identical sales ranging from 100 to 123. That's less than half the next lowest book, Marvel's short-lived FUN AND GAMES puzzle and features publication.

Back to the top of the chart, X-MEN is pretty solidly the best selling book in these markets, over 60% higher than the #2 book. The Marvel Universe titles in general seem to have improved against the Marvel licensed books in the last year, although the launch of KING CONAN seems to have done well, at $0.75 per issue it's close to tied in retail value with X-MEN at $0.40. The launch issue a few months earlier was #1, with sales almost 150% of X-MEN, so I guess the history of big second issue drops began early in the direct market.

First non-Marvel on the book is again DC's WARLORD, this time at #27. I guess it could be seen as an improvement that this time a few of DC's super-hero books (LEGION and JLA) come in just ahead of the worst selling of Marvel's non-reprint colour comics, like GHOST  RIDER. WONDER WOMAN is DC's worst selling super-hero book, other than SUPER FRIENDS which is again in the middle of DC's western, war and mystery titles. Interestingly, TIME WARP, DC's short-lived $1 science-fiction title, was selling better in these markets than the other non-super-hero titles, and many of the super-hero titles, but was cancelled after five issues this month. Guess it wasn't doing as well in other markets.

HEAVY METAL is again the best selling non-DC/Marvel comic at #51.  The Warren magazines fall below it, in the range of the non-super-hero DC books and Marvel reprint books

And again, not a single first issue this month.  Even when they did launch new books back then, they didn't do it in March, I guess.