Monthly Comic Book Sales Report: October 2015

Curious about the longevity of our Burnside Batgirl?  Well, look no further.  In this installment of the monthly sales report, I provide a complete breakdown for the sales of the ongoing Batgirl title.  Get ready, the results might shock you! But first, let’s take a look at our October numbers.

Below you will find a chart detailing the 30 comics that this site reviews, along with the total sales for this month and several previous months.  Numbers displayed are in the thousands.   Keep in mind that these numbers represent physical copies sold.  Numbers for the sales of digital comics are not currently being reported to the general public.  Also, be aware that comics like Injustice are available in the digital format before print.  This means that the bulk of their real sales are hidden to us.

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Aside from the typical 1 to 2 thousand bleed that we see monthly for comics across the board, two comics had a huge drop in sales.  Justice League of America and Detective Comics saw a loss of 11 and 9 thousand, respectively.  Justice League of America might be plummeting like a lawn dart, but its big brother Justice League was actually the only comic from October that saw a positive gain.

I look at the bottom ten titles on our list, and I am already saying my farewells.  Some of them we know are already ending due to the title reaching a predetermined endpoint and some having already had announced cancellations.  For the ones that don’t fall under those categories, I’d be surprised if they make it another 4 months.  Gotham Academy, I’m going to miss you most of all…  (There has been no official word on Gotham Academy being cancelled.  I’m just being dramatic.)

If you saw last month’s sales report, I did a break down of the sales on every issue of Batman since 2011.  If you’re curious where October’s Batman #45 falls on that list, 3rd place.  From the very bottom!  Yep.  I’m pretty sure that before all this is done, we are going to see an issue of JimBat take the prize as one of the lowest selling issues of Scott Snyder’s entire run on the title.  Not where I wanted to see Snyder bow out, but it looks like that is where this is headed.  Another area of concern is Titans Hunt debuting at 31, 037.  That is an extremely low number for a new book to come into the mix on.  I dare say that this bodes poorly for the books limited future.

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In keeping with last months breakdown of all the Batman titles since 2011, I decided to throw one together for Batgirl as well.  Shall I let this one speak for itself?  Nooooo.  Let’s talk about those Burnside numbers.  The premiere issue did rather well, but as I am hoping we all know by now, when a new book/new creative team/new story line is introduced, you always have a surge in readership initially.  It usually takes about 3 issues after that for the window shoppers to disappear and for us to get an accurate idea as to how well a book is genuinely doing.  If you take a look at the bottom of this list, you will see that it is populated by half of the existing Burnside issues.  That one at the very bottom is the wedding issue, for those of you wondering.  It also took Simone twice as long to go from 60k to 30k, showing that the Stewart run is declining at a much faster pace. While the fan base for Stewart’s run is definitely pulling in smaller numbers, I have to admit that they are far more loyal.  When you look at Simone’s run, it is characterized by huge spikes and plummets all over the place.  People came and went whenever they wanted, usually accompanied by a major event.  After the initial drop in Stewart’s run however, he has had some very consistent numbers, even though they are generally smaller.  As long as he can maintain the loyalty of this smaller group of fans, I see no reason as to why Burnside Batgirl won’t have a long and fruitful career.  Rejoice or despair, as you see fit.

MSRbatgirl

Do you guys like seeing an entire run of a title laid out before you?  If so, are there any other titles you would be interested in seeing me do this for?  Just let me know in the comments.  And thanks for reading.

October 2015 – top 50

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