November 18, 2010
Go, Read: John Jackson Miller On X-Men #1 And Record-Setting Sales Figures
Numbers guru John Jackson Miller uses the occasion of the listing of Marvel's
X-Men #1 in the Guinness Book Of World Records
to look at different sales records across format and how much cultural stock we might wish to place in each one. The only disappointment I had reading that artice is that Miller didn't engage
Asterix, which has I think about 325 million in sales worldwide and offers both a cumulative sales figure and the millions of sales that come with new volumes for comparison purposes. I'm not saying
Asterix leads any sales category, but it's up there and it's ongoing.
As for those comics that Miller
does examine, I think
X-Men #1 is actually a
more fascinating object for the divorce of its sales from one-to-one desire to consume that work. For one thing, it's like a film box office record-holder where the number of tickets bought by people who wanted empty seats all around them were a significant factor. It's also fascinating to note that the fact many of these books were sold to a box isn't all that important for people that are really excited about all those copies being sold. Also, can you imagine owning 5000 of any one thing? The mind boggles.
posted 7:00 am PST |
Permalink
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
Full Archives