Comic book sales had been dwindling significantly since the heyday of World War II but received an unexpected burst with the phenomenal 1966 success of TV's BATMAN.
Here's a site that shows sales figures on comics from 1966:
As expected, BATMAN was at number one. Surprisingly, DETECTIVE COMICS, also cover-featuring the Caped Crusader, only made it as high as number eleven and with about half the sales.
A few other interesting things to note here:
Not a single Marvel title made the Top Ten. In fact, only AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and FANTASTIC FOUR made the next ten!
The only non-DC title in the Top Ten was ARCHIE!
No less than eight of the lowest selling ten were published by Charlton.
TREASURE CHEST, the Catholic comic book not distributed through regular channels, was nonetheless the thirteenth biggest selling comic of the year.
The biggest selling war comic was SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS but it was still beaten by BUGS BUNNY, UNCLE SCROOGE, TARZAN , JUGHEAD and TOM & JERRY.
The lowest selling DC titles were THE FOX AND THE CROW and SEA DEVILS. The lowest selling Marvels were MILLIE THE MODEL and THE RAWHIDE KID.
Not even the top-selling titles came that close to matching the million copies per month that some comic books had commanded in their previous peak two decades earlier.
Not every title nor every publisher is listed here.
The most interesting thing about this list is that back then the success of the Batman TV series helped comic sales. Today, the success of a comic-book movie, does next to NOTHING for comic sales. The Dark Knight was smash hit but sales of Batman comics stayed pretty much the same. Same goes for most characters which were made into movies.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the least selling title on that list, Cheyenne Kid, has sales of more than 116,000. Comics nowadays can only DREAM of such a figure.