Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Borys Kit, hollywood reporter

The Hollywood Reporter, DC Comics And Why Marvel Is Still Selling More

The Hollywood Reporter, DC Comics and why Marvel is still selling more comics in comic book stores than DC

At the end of the year, The Hollywood Reporter has often run a PR-puff interview by Borys Kit with DC Comics executives that is as challenging as Barney the Dinosaur after smoking a couple of fat ones. The one with Daniel Cherry III remains a classic of soft soaping. This year, Borys Kit hasn't even bothered with a full interview, just an article about how great DC Comics has been doing with a number of DC Comics executives agreeing with him. It also states that "The publisher reveals sales numbers exclusively with The Hollywood Reporter, including some surprising statistics about 'Batman.'" Again, a definition of the word "exclusive" that I was previously unaware of, as there is a habit here of claiming exclusives that were reported elsewhere…

The statistics that The Hollywood Reporter had to itself were that the Absolute Universe line of monthly comics had sold over 8.2 million units in total, excluding December sales. That Absolute Batman makes up around 35 per cent, close to 3 million, of that total. But unless you break it down, that is meaningless.  Until November, we have 14 Absolute Batman, 14 Absolute Wonder Woman, 13 Absolute Superman, 9 Absolute Flash, 8 Absolute Green Lantern, 6 Absolute Martian Manhunter, and DC All in Special and Absolute Evil. Sixty-six individual titles, that's an average of 125,000 copies each, and that will include the multiple printings that many of the books underwent. However, splitting Batman out means an average of $ 215,000 for each issue of Absolute Batman, and the rest are on average $100,000 each, including multiple printings.

But as to the first issue of Absolute Batman now being in its 10th printing, well, we ran that at the beginning of the month. And the latest issue, Absolute Batman #15, having orders of over 300,000, we did the same. Another "exclusive" sales figure is that September's Batman #1, by Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez has sold over 500,000 copies, which would have been exclusive if we hadn't run that in September.

Borys said that "DC did not provide additional numbers" but that "the company's top five titles also included Batman No. 158, which featured the return of executive Lee to art duties; Absolute Batman No. 15; Batman Deadpool, DC's inter-company venture with Marvel combining the two popular characters (Marvel Comics put out their version of the initiative, Deadpool Batman, a month earlier, in September)." However, Borys doesn't say that Marvel's version sold a lot more than DC's.

And that's the elephant in the room here. What the article doesn't address, or even ask, is that even with all this DC success – and it is definitely successful – how come Marvel Comics still sells more than DC Comics across the direct market of comic book stores? The answer is that Marvel Comics simply publishes more titles than DC Comics. And that, while the best-selling titles, thanks to Absolute and Batman, were DC titles, the majority of the mid-range titles were Marvel titles. And there were a lot more of them. Overall, even as the X-books sales fall relatively lower than for fifty years, Marvel Comics sells more on average than DC titles, and they put out around twice as many. DC Comics fired a lot of editorial staff post-lockdown and dropped a lot of titles. And they haven't made up the numbers since, even though their best-selling titles have done very well indeed.

The one statistic everyone can agree on is that new readership is up across the board. Strong Marvel, strong DC, strong Skybound, strong Mark Spears, strong comic book store market. The only downside is that the big guys may all be pulling some sales from smaller publishers as retailers only have so much cash and shift it to books they know they can sell…

And of course, this is just the comic book store market. Switch to bookstores and Amazon, and it's the power of kids' comic books that really shifts units. The success of the Absolute Universe at DC Comics, more than anything, is that it seems to have tapped into the resultant market of kids buying Dog Man when it came out in 2016 and now, nine years later, find themselves to be the perfect audience for Absolute Batman as their way into DC Comics. And that is the market where Marvel, despite their Scholastic deals, is still lacking. Will that change in 2026?

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