Le sigh. This again?
I get it, I really do. The folks bashing on the current non-flagship-book sales aren't particularly subtle in their praise/defense/whatever of the Gold/Blue/Red era. Not only that, but downplaying how much ass the flagship is currently kicking compared to its recent predecessors feels hilariously selective/unfair. Snarky Defiance in the name of Truth and Justice. Gotcha. Mostly in agreement, too.
That being said, HoX/DoX was preemptively hailed as the badassest X-related event in almost twenty years and, hey, what do you know, a few months down the line, the second best-selling X-Book is beating X-Men Blue, by, what, less than 10%?
Just saying, there's valid points on both sides of the fence.
What were the sales of Red like around now? People posted Blue and Gold. I'm assuming X-force and Mr. and Mrs. sold....not great.
U.S. Avengers was a lot of fun. Lots of crazy ideas in that one. I loved their idiotic Rogues like Gold Skull, whose fetishism led him to make a battlemech out of actual gold, the softest metal in the world. (Real effective.)
But yeah, Avengers and that teen centric young justice wannabe garbage, the Champions, were sooooo bad.
"A happy ending? So unlikely. We're not having a moment here.
Wrong city, wrong people, all huddling in fear.
No one escapes the slaughterhouse, and that's just where you're at.
(You could've asked Rebecca but then Adam stomped her flat.)
You think you're special cuz you're scrappy? You're deluded, time to go.
Lucy's living on the moon but you're another dead psycho."
Fallen Angels sells better then Red did.
I'm enjoying the Avengers and X-Men.
Actully, I think storywise, Marvel is in a really fun place right now. Sure, sales might be crap, but hey, that's for the poor marketing and finance departments to figure out.
it has sales atritions. In May it has been going for 2 years. Fallen angels has been going on for 3 months. not comparable
Blue/Gold era had serious problems, some of them caused by waiting for Hickman arrive. You may want to mock, but this won't work it here.
Before Hickman writers had to write without really changing status quo, get worse artists. Gold got the worse produver of the arrowverse.
The fact that gold/blue fight very well with sales with DOX non x-men hickman sales, speak a lot that sales are good back then even with everything against it
A very interesting thing is that the X books are always in amazing positions at Comixology. The three books of last week are top 5, that's amazing for books like Excalibur. And if you go to the second page of the Best Selles, you'll see A LOT of previous issues of X-books, giving the notion that readers are picking up older issues that they lost, because interest is high and they want to catch up. Only Fallen Angels does not appear (understandbly).
https://www.comixology.com/comics-best-sellers
Last edited by Weather; 02-18-2020 at 07:58 AM.
Only chipping in because I used to work in a comic shop, and not interested in comparing eras writers etc.
One of the difficulties in comparing the DoX books to the monthly sales of previous titles is that the DoX titles aren't shipping on a monthly basis, where you could estimate your orders and adjust accordingly.
Shelf-space is a tricky thing to manage. In the shop I worked in we (loosely) had space for a *small* number of back issues, but ordered most titles based on what we thought would exactly sell out, no overstock and no customers left without ( a very difficult process). I should mention we were gradually giving more and more of the shop over to toys etc also.
The process gets further complicated when there are new number 1s being churned out all the time, and when you only have so much shelf space for wanting to keep (ideally) the last three issues of any specific title on the shelves. I suspect for Marvel (using new mutants as an example) the extra copies being ordered in the short-term by double-shipping (even with inferior art/story such as in New Mutants issues) is more of a cash cow than monthly solid sales, particularly if, going on past history, you dont expect many titles to live past twenty issues.
On the bigger picture, I'm pleased to see the X-Books doing well, but I'm already a little bit worried about market saturation. But pleased I have had a real job for many years and no longer need to worry about orders!
Last edited by Captain Buttocks; 02-18-2020 at 08:01 AM. Reason: extra info