I've been playing around with the Comichron sales numbers in Excel and I noticed an interesting trend back in the 90's

I should mention that these were issues 353-377.

Keep going, see where it all leads and get it posted by comic beats

>The only #1s that Marvel had at that time that cracked 100,000 sales were Thor, ASM, Gambit, Peter Parker Spider-Man, Slingers, and Spider-Man Chapter 1. Yikes.

Wow. I remember those times.

I think it would be interesting to see some comparisons between DC/Marvel top 10 sellers in the 90s, pre-crash and post-crash. Or maybe compare Marvel's 90s sales with the Danny Ketch Ghostrider title, which from my understanding was losing money for nearly its entire running time, Marvel only keeping it in-print because there was plenty of talk of doing an animated show that never materialized.

And maybe something like comparing how well all the different Batman-senpai titles did in different eras, especially around the early 00s when you had like, what seven or eight Bat-books coming out at the same time?

If I remember right...
Thor had high sales because it was the last Heroes Return relaunch, this time with Jurgens and JRJR on the book.
Gambit was high because he was still popular at this point, I guess. I can't remember who worked on his book at this point. Nicieza? Skroce?

ASM/Peter Parker/Chapter One were all part of the John Byrne and Howard Mackie revamp/relaunch/reboot. Before this Byrne had gotten some flack for his Wonder Woman but still considered a star (even if not as big as he was in the 80's), so people ordering a lot is understandable. But yeah, this was probably the first major blow to Byrne's career public perception-wise.

Slingers had this fucked up thing where it was variant interiors. There were four versions of #1, each spotlighting one of the Slingers. According to Paul O'Brien, Marvel wasn't the only one that did this; DC also did it with Team Titans #1 in the early 90's, Top Cow did it with Fathom (though he doesn't say which issue), and Malibu/Marvel did it with Avengers/Ultraforce (O'Brien didn't mention it, but they also did it with Spider-Man/Ultraforce too, I think) but according to O'Brien it was Slingers where the approach allegedly flopped and Marvel didn't persue it any further. My guess is the difference between DC doing it in the early 90's and Marvel doing it in 1998 was that the cover price for Team Titans in the early 90's was $1.75 while the cover price for Slingers in 1998 was $2.99.

And to be real honest, I'd rather they stick with variant covers than ever do variant interiors again.

>And maybe something like comparing how well all the different Batman-senpai titles did in different eras, especially around the early 00s when you had like, what seven or eight Bat-books coming out at the same time?

This would also interest me too because people had this mistaken belief that Batman titles always sold as well as they do now (the truth is, they sold consistently, but they weren't getting 100,000 numbers regularly during the late 90's and possibly early 00's, until Hush)

It would also illustrate how bad things were after the crash. IIRC, there was a time when Superman and Batman made like half of everything DC put out because they were the only things selling anything remotely good numbers. I think Cass' Batgirl was actually one of DC's best selling books, even.

I know Morrison's JLA was DC's top seller from time to time. Batgirl did well early on (the boost from No Man's Land helped), same with Harley (who had a fanbase but it wasn't as big as it's become in the last 6-10 years), but then both sales dipped for some reason or another at some point and got canceled.

Sorry boys, I don't have any pre-crash numbers from comichron.
And my baseline is 1998. It was the first complete year that has all the sales and not just some arbitrary index. Check out the early comichron links for yourself, they're not super useful for comparisons.
For instance, for most of 96, Marvel wasn't using Diamond! So there isn't any way to get those numbers.
comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/1996/1996-08Diamond.html

>Thor had high sales because it was the last Heroes Return relaunch, this time with Jurgens and JRJR on the book.

That was a pretty great run. Kinda annoyed me how they wrote out his civilian secret identity instead of doing anything with it, but I suppose everybody was more interested in the Thor stories rather than what was happening with his crooked EMT partner and his girlfriend and family.

I'm curious, why does comichron have this info? Like, why doesn't Diamond just host the numbers themselves instead of giving it to CC?

Are you those niggers who are always coming up with IT'S A FLOP UNLESS IT MAKES A TRILLION copypastas?

That ain't me.

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