February Sales Numbers

ICv2 just published their sales number estimates for February, and I thought I'd take a moment to see what information I can glean from them.

#1 -- Civil War 7 -- 265,935
There are now nearly 266,000 disgruntled fans of Marvel comics.

#13 -- Brave and the Bold 1 -- 92,091
Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of those disgruntled Marvel fans decided to start buying something decent.

#14 -- Civil War: Front Line 11 -- 89,163
An equal portion of those disgruntled Marvel fans are also masochists.

#20 -- Ultimate Spider-Man 105 -- 74,376
Ultimate Spider-Man 18 sold 77,492 copies. That's a drop of less than 1% over the course of four years with the same creative team, with no gimmicks or over-hyped crossovers. I think there just MIGHT be something to be said for simply putting out a quality product.

#51 -- Superman & Batman vs. Aliens & Predator -- 36,119
You can only swindle about 36,000 fans with crossover "events."

#52 -- Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil 1 -- 35,970
#55 -- Trials of Shazam 5 -- 34,614
There are 1,356 fans of Jeff Smith who aren't already fans of Captain Marvel.

#72 -- She-Hulk 16 -- 27,961
Dan Slott is severely under-rated.

#88 -- Thunderbolts Presents: Zemo -- Born Better 1 -- 22,680
Fabian Nicieza is also severely under-rated.

#100 -- Nextwave: Agents of HATE 12 -- 21,574
Ranking and/or popularity is no indication of quality.

#118 -- Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #49 -- 17,939
This is going to get canceled soon, isn't it?

#202 -- Local 8 -- 6,005
Brian Wood has just about six thousand fans...

#231 -- PvP 31 -- 4,308
...which is still 2300 more than Scott Kurtz!

#253 -- Pirates of Coney Island 4 -- 2,728
#256 -- Pirates vs. Ninjas 2 -- 2,570
Pirates are only popular if they look like Johnny Depp...

#294 -- Ninja High School 147 --1,497
... but they still outclass ninjas!

Okay, obviously, I'm being more than a little facetious here, but I don't know that I'm that far off the mark on some of these comments. I would not at all be surprised if the bean-counters at Marvel and DC look at the same numbers and come up with similar thoughts... "Hey, if we include a story in the next issue that's written by Brian Wood and drawn by Scott Kurtz, we should get an additional 10,000 in sales!" Laugh if you want, but I bet the exact same type of analysis goes on under the eyes of Quesada and DiDido.

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