Library Cover Stats

As a follow-up from yesterday, and mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, I pulled together some quick stats about the comic covers I'm looking at in my library now. As you might have noticed from those photos, the fronts of all my long boxes have a comic displayed on them. I use this to quickly indicate what's in any particular box. Since my comics are all organized alphabetically, I can look at the visible cover and know that every other issue in the box comes after that one. I put together a set of instructions on how I actually set this up, which I most recently published in March.

(I actually first posted the idea back in 2009 and, while I think it's been inordinately useful and it's an idea I'm actually kind of proud of, I have never seen/heard of anyone else who's done this. I genuinely don't understnad how/why more people haven't adopted this idea.)

Anyway, because my comics are just organized alphabetically, any random selection of issues should, in theory, be somewhat representative of my collection as a whole. I haven't done precise calculations of these numbers against my entire collection, they do offhand strike me as a pretty good cross-section of what I've got. So out of the 59 covers being displayed on the fronts of my long boxes, here's how some of the numbers break down...

• Number of Marvel titles: 29
• Number of DC titles: 10
• Total number of publishers visible: 19

• Most-represented characters: Fantastic Four (four title appearances, two team appearances on other titles, one solo character title, one cover homage)
• Most visible single character: Spider-Man (five covers)
• Most covers by an artist: Mark Bagley (four)
• Newest comic visible: Firefly: Keep Flying #1, 2022
• Oldest comic visible: Fantastic Four #53, 1966

• Number of visible characters created/co-created by Jack Kirby: 48
• Number of covers drawn by the title's original creator: 14
• Number of covers featuring Black, Latinx, or Asian characters: 10
• Number of covers mentioning "dead" or "death": four
• Number of reprint books: three
• Number of covers with gorillas/apes: two
• Number of '90s gimmick covers: two
• Number of anthology issues: one
• Number of covers featuring Nazis getting punched: one

Also, I'm not sure if there's a single stat on this per se, but I have one cover each featuring Superman and Wonder Woman (two-thirds of DC's "trinity") while Batman (the remaining third of that trinity) appears three times. Weirdly, the only other 'classic' Justice League members to appear at all are Aquaman and Black Canary. None of these characters are actually visible on any Justice League related titles though.

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