Looking at some numbers

I was reviewing some order numbers from retailers. There are a few places to find these, but for the typical collector (non industry member) you can find them in Comic Buyers Guide.

Whenever you view the order numbers I keep some sort of benchmark in mind. I usually use an X-men book (Uncanny for instance) and a DC (Batman?) to give a good idea of how many issues a solid title is selling. There is not a lot of hype in these books, and retailers have a pretty firm idea how many they need to order. For this example Uncanny X-men #477 had 89,100 orders and Batman #656 had 95,800.

Now the interesting stuff. The same month retailers ordered a whopping 212,200 issues of Justice League of America #1! How do you think this issue will do over time? Without a doubt, these #1 issues have a lot of speculation. Will the price hold up? If we look at another popular book with a little more hype we see some strong numbers. The book I looked at is Astonishing X-men #16 with 120,100 copies ordered. Still strong, but a long way from 212,200.

Before we get put off too much by the 212,200 number I want to talk about one other option you need to look at. We'll discuss it in the next post. Stay tuned...