What the Dinosaurs Read... (part 4)

I've already looked at THE COMIC READER's Top 100 chart for March of 1979, 1980 and 1981. Unfortunately the chart didn't last until March of 1982, so I'll just look at what appears to be the last chart they ran, for September 1981 and appearing in TCR #199 (editor: Michael Tiefenbacher publisher: Jerome Sinkovec). Here's a decent list of comics published that month.

Without any big launches, X-MEN has its usual comfortable lead up top.  DC's NEW TEEN TITANS is #2.  DC also has a few more recent launches doing well, ALL-STAR SQUADRON and ARAK. Not too much of a surprise that DC's top books all have key people who had recently left Marvel.

We hit the first non-DC/Marvel book more quickly than usual, with the second issue of Jack Kirby's CAPTAIN VICTORY from Pacific at #23.

DC's turn to do the DC/Marvel crossover, with the Batman/Hulk tabloid at #34.  The $2.50 cover price, when most comics were $0.50 or $0.60, means it was probably the top book at retail. At $2 each, THE SPIRIT (published by Kitchen Sink, with the "Spirit Jam" issue) and HEAVY METAL are up there in dollar terms compared to their middle of the chart unit rankings.

At #53 we get a first issue (actually a one-shot), SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS, based on the cartoon of the same name. The other first issue on the chart is Whitman's CONDORMAN, adapting the Disney movie.

Not too many other notables on the list, just the usual mix of Whitman and Harvey comics, followed by Archie at the tail end of the top 100. MAD MAGAZINE does show up at #79, selling less than CRAZY a few positions above it.  That's probably one of the few markets where you could say CRAZY outsold MAD and not be accused of being cracked.

So what can we learn from these charts?  WARLORD was much more popular than I thought.  Marvel heavily dominated the market from early on, It took DC picking up some creators driven out of Marvel to begin to erode that dominance.  First issues were still infrequent at this point, but when they were published you can already see the evolution of the huge launch followed by a massive second issue drop. And of course there's the increasing value of having your most popular characters (at that time the X-Men, not yet specifically Wolverine) do guest star roles.

Anyway, the whole thing was an interesting experiment. I'm not sure when we next saw a decent sales chart for the direct market. I think AMAZING HEROES ran a similar one a few years later, buy my collection of those is sketchy. If I can dig one up I'll post it.  By the mid-1980s the comic shop distribution had solidified enough that there were several big established distributors, like Capital and Diamond, and eventually they were releasing some charts about what they sold, generally using index values tied to percentages of key books. I think the COMICS BUYER'S GUIDE ran charts based on that occasionally, and their publisher had a magazine called COMICS RETAILER which I'm sure must have run those numbers. After a few years and various odd events Diamond became practically a monopoly in direct market distribution, so using its chart, with knowledge of actual sales of a few books, gives a pretty clear general picture of the direct market from the mid-1990s on.