With DC Comics about to relaunch their entire line in a little over a month, Valiant Comics announcing a return in 2012, and Marvel beginning to resurrect the CrossGen comics line, I’m left wondering if rebooting isn’t something comics should do more often?
In the mid-80s, DC introduced the world to the Crisis on Infinite Worlds, a series that hit a big, red “reset” button on the history of the DCU. Things that happened before 1986 were known as “Pre-Crisis continuity,” and things that happened afterwards were part of a new history that did not have to rely on the 40+ years of continuity to tell interesting stories.
Around the same time, Jim Shooter was the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics. He was under the impression that Marvel had done all that they could with the current Marvel Universe, and began a line known as the “New Universe.” These were comics set in their own world, and were, according to rumor, going to replace the Marvel Universe as Marvel’s primary line of characters.
Now, obviously, this didn’t happen, and Shooter left Marvel shortly thereafter to create Valiant Comics, which were very successful for nearly a decade, before the entire industry crashed in 1997. Valiant and their assets were bought out by video game company Acclaim, who published all the Valiant comics under the “Acclaim Comics” brand, before they went out of business a few years later.
But what if Shooter HAD ended the Marvel universe? Would Kickers Inc. be in the top ten books every month instead of Avengers? Would we all be buying DP7, instead of one of the eighteen X-Men titles?
And after 20 years (so about 2000), would they have hit reset again, creating a secondary Marvel Universe, with the characters we know and love? Oh, wait. They ULTIMATELY did that ANYWAYS.
But, 300 words later, I digress.
Number-One issues of a comic series universally sell better than any other number of that same series. So why not produce more #1 issues?
Well, there’s the immediate argument that we run into issues like there were in the late 80s and early 90s, where there were SO MANY new #1s, the market got flooded with a whole bunch of new series that it couldn’t handle, and with so much product out there, quality was bound to slip, and the industry crashed in on itself.
But what if a series got rebooted every so often on a regular basis?
Let’s look at one of the best examples: Brian Michael Bendis’ NEW AVENGERS #1, in 2004. In November 2004, Marvel shipped AVENGERS #503 and AVENGERS FINALE. 503 shipped 105,761 copies, and FINALE shipped 101,431. One month later, NEW AVENGERS #1 shipped 240,724 copies; That’s more than both of November’s issues COMBINED.
So, let’s look at these numbers on a long-term basis. AVENGERS had last relaunched in 1997, as a part of Marvel’s HEROES RETURN line (A year after the HEROES REBORN debacle). I don’t have numbers going that far back, but I was able to go back to 2002.
In December of 2002, Marvel double-shipped AVENGERS, meaning there were two issues that month. AVENGERS #61 sold 55,506 copies, and AVENGERS #62 sold 55,145 copies. In December 2003, Marvel double-shipped AVENGERS again. AVENGERS #75 shipped 57,814 copies, while AVENGERS #76 sold 57,501 copies. A bit of growth over the year, but still nothing to brag about. By comparison, the THREE ISSUES of Uncanny X-Men that shipped in Dec 2003 all sold over 89,000 copies. Each.
So NEW AVENGERS #1 selling 240,724 copies was a huge growth. But did it sustain? Well, no. NEW AVENGERS #2 sold 153,751 copies, which is about 90,000 copies fewer. But it’s also nearly 90,000 copies MORE than the previous two years that Avengers had sold in the previous two years. NEW AVENGERS #3 sold 148,973 copies. Still a bit of a decline, but it was still the best-selling comic that month, by over 10,000 copies.
Fast-forward a year, and New Avengers #15 sells 121,758 copies as the third-best-selling comic in January 2006 (after DC event comics INFINITE CRISIS #4, and ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #2, meaning it was still the best-selling ongoing comic). So after a little over a year, sales on New Avengers halved from #1, but were still about double what they were before the relaunch.
When Marvel re-re-launched both AVENGERS and NEW AVENGERS last year, AVENGERS #1 (2010) sold at 163,867 copies, and NEW AVENGERS at 129,084 copies. NEW AVENGERS FINALE shipped 76,918 copies. Comic book sales have gone down about 20% in general over the last five years, so that’s not unreasonable. And last month, AVENGERS #13 sold 68,086 copies, while NEW AVENGERS #12 sold 60,328 copies. Both are significantly lower numbers than NEW AVENGERS (2004) sold in its first year, but now there are TWO Avengers books, and sales are STILL up over where they were in 2002.
So what does all this mean?
It means that, at least in the case of the major AVENGERS titles, that the occasional relaunch was a VERY good idea, and it has helped sustain the franchise a lot better than it would have, had Marvel just let the series go on with its original numbering. About 10,000 of the new readers who jumped on with NEW AVENGERS #1 in 2004 have stayed on board. And they’re now buying two monthly AVENGERS comics, instead of just the one.
(Granted, the first issues of both of 2010’s Avengers books sold so many copies because people like me also bought those black sketch variant covers.)
So will DC’s line-wide relaunch help? Well, putting their top creators on JUSTICE LEAGUE, which, by all accounts I’ve come across, is looking to be the flagship book of the “DCNu,” will certainly see that book’s sales shoot up. Last month, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #57 moved 46,729 copies, and was #25 in sales. Come August 31, I predict that JUSTICE LEAGUE #1 will break 100,000 copies, and be #1 in sales.
(All sales numbers taken from ICV2.com’s “TOP 300 COMICS ACTUAL SALES” articles from the following months: December 2002, Dec 2003, Nov 2004, Dec 2004, Jan 2005, Feb 2005, Jan 2006, May 2010, June 2010, and May 2011.)