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| Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 4/1/07]
In talking with Chris Brandt the other day about the Kefauver report figures, I looked into the dataset and did some back-of-the-napkin guesses based on what was in the existing Statements as compared with the issues known to have been published, but for which Statements have not been found.
The guesses generated between us -- so I dont forget them -- were...
1940 175 million copies
1944 250 million copies
1953 600 million copies
1960 400 million copies
1967 350 million copies
1974 250 million copies
1981 200 million copies
1987 300 million copies
1990 300-350 million copies
1993 400-500 million copies
...and then bracket a range of plus or minus 20% or so on those that don't have ranges. I won't get into the alchemy behind those guesses -- they're a combination of what was in the congressional report, ballparking based on the Statement files, and other documentation I have yet to publish -- but as it will be a while before I'm prepared to do these estimates in detail on the site, these'll hold for now.
It does seem that the only really down year from the black-and-white boom was 1988 -- as that was a collapse that affected independent publishers far more than it impacted retailers or mainstream publishers, the numeric impact seems to vanish by the time the color comics boom revs up.
Best, John Jackson Miller • Curator, The Comics Chronicles |
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| Re: Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 4/3/2007]
Do you have any information on the number of titles and issues published for those years? It might be interesting to see how much of the change is a result of more or less titles and issues being published. |
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| Re: Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 4/5/2007]
Not titles, but issues:
When I was doing the Standard Catalog of Comic Books, this is how many issues in the database were recorded as having been published in any given year as of Jan. 1, 2005. It goes all haywire after that, because I added all the Whitman variants -- so these are as close to the numbers as that resource ever got.
There were always several thousand comics for which we didn’t have an exact year, so these figures are a touch low.
In the meantime, you can still see high and low points (boldfaced below) that lag slightly behind gluts and lulls in the business, as publishers figure out they’re over- or underestimating demand for new stuff. In particular, regard how the publisher response to the black-and-white crash in 1987 lagged into 1988; almost no drop in new material at all.
YEAR -- Issues published
1933 -- 2
1934 -- 8
1935 -- 13
1936 -- 75
1937 -- 147
1938 -- 202
1939 -- 300
1940 -- 698
1941 -- 860
1942 -- 975
1943 -- 1,097
1944 -- 1,130
1945 -- 1,132
1946 -- 1,500
1947 -- 1,608
1948 -- 1,919
1949 -- 2,107
1950 -- 2,112
1951 -- 2,447
1952 -- 2,893
1953 -- 2,593
1954 -- 2,404
1955 -- 2,003
1956 -- 1,823
1957 -- 1,704
1958 -- 1,532
1959 -- 1,438
1960 -- 1,408
1961 -- 1,432
1962 -- 1,377
1963 -- 1,434
1964 -- 1,526
1965 -- 1,488
1966 -- 1,569
1967 -- 1,634
1968 -- 1,358
1969 -- 1,594
1970 -- 1,506
1971 -- 1,521
1972 -- 1,740
1973 -- 1,986
1974 -- 1,759
1975 -- 2,110
1976 -- 2,193
1977 -- 1,877
1978 -- 1,779
1979 -- 1,641
1980 -- 1,545
1981 -- 1,510
1982 -- 1,419
1983 -- 1,398
1984 -- 1,618
1985 -- 1,778
1986 -- 2,286
1987 -- 2,906
1988 -- 2,930
1989 -- 2,331
1990 -- 2,820
1991 -- 3,080
1992 -- 3,262
1993 -- 4,236
1994 -- 4,943
1995 -- 4,970
1996 -- 4,475
1997 -- 4,474
1998 -- 4,198
1999 -- 3,561
2000 -- 3,326
2001 -- 2,904
2002 -- 3,067
2003 -- 3,680
2004 -- 3,552
TOTAL 144,023
Best, John Jackson Miller • Curator, The Comics Chronicles |
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| Re: Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 4/17/2007]
Hey John, Great site. I look forward to seeing more of your results and discussing them with you.
I've loved all the stats you posted in the past in various publications, but I've always thought they were generally on the low side. Especially the sales numbers. In any event, it is great that someone is putting out something.
This is the first time I've seen your Number of Issues Published per year stats. And again they seem to come out low. As you know, I co-founded the Grand Comic-Book Database and we have a long time fan who has been helping us identify holes in our data. I'm not sure if you know Dan Stevenson, but he's been confirming the actual comic books that have been published since 1933 for the last 10+ years through APA-I. And been generating lists and totals for them.
Here is a comparison of data for a small sample:
Year - Standard Guide - Stevenson data - Guide % of Stevenson
1950 -- 2,112 - 2,283 - 93%
1951 -- 2,447 - 2,619 - 93%
1952 -- 2,893 - 3,162 - 92%
1953 -- 2,593 - 2,880 - 90%
1954 -- 2,404 - 2,719 - 88%
1955 -- 2,003 - 2,338 - 86%
Also, with more recent data, I approached it differently, and much more laborious. I took all of shipping lists that Diamond puts out every week and extracted all the comic books shipped. Then I totaled each weeks number of comics and got a grand total. I eliminated any duplicate entries. Here is a comparison:
Year - Guide - Stroup data - Guide % of Stroup
1999 -- 3,561 - 4,880 - 73%
2000 -- 3,326 - 4,849 - 69%
2001 -- 2,904 - 4,563 - 64%
2002 -- 3,067 - 5,119 - 60%
In this day of tons of b/w small press/Indy books, I'm not surprised at seeing some difference in our numbers, but I am surprised at how big the difference is. There must be a difference in what data we collect as I didn't add any in for books that shipped only outside of Diamond. But those would be pretty insignificant even counting ones that went through Cold Cut or FM. If you have any ideas as to what the differences might be, I'd love to hear them. I better go back and triple check my data at this point.
- Tim Stroup Cold Cut Distribution |
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| Re: Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 4/17/2007]
Sorry about the forum software -- I'm still working out the bugs. It doesn't like tables -- which I need it to. Anyway, I was able to reformat a little in your post.
As to the numbers of issues, those were generated in 2004, I believe, based on a snapshot of the comics database we had at the time. Now, I know that we were light on Atlas books by several hundred, so I think a goodly part of the gap there in the 1950s comes from those. I would certainly take the GCD number over the Catalog number at that time -- though I would hope you're able to extract just U.S. releases, as that's what I was going for.
On the modern end, I'm not entirely sure we were counting the same things. How does variant covers fit into your scheme? The other trick with duplication on the Diamond lists is that they duplicate so many ways -- "offered agains", special solicitation codes and who knows what else. I'm not doubting your figures -- I did a count of just line items in 1998 and came up with a figure closer to 5,000, too -- but somewhere between ComicBase and the Catalog staff, we still wound up in the 3,000s for those years.
Pete Bickford was and still is ordering one of everything for his ComicBase staff to catalog, and as they were the major source for new items in the 2000-2002 era, perhaps it has something to do with what they choose to figure as a unique record? Mostly my focus while on the Catalog was on the older stuff -- the newer stuff was a place to park circ figures with -- so if there was a swath missing, I wouldn't have known it.
I think the biggest problem is that with the last Catalog coming out in 2005, much of the development work (including all the Atlas additions) we did never got seen, except as snippets in the magazine. It's winding up in ComicBase, but then they're advancing so far ahead with their own data entry that it's really another animal at this point. Of course, that was the problem as it was with the Catalogs -- a fifth edition, we were told, would have been so large as to be unmarketable...
Best, John Jackson Miller • Curator, The Comics Chronicles |
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| Re: Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 9/29/2007]
By way of comparison, here are some published figures which I've turned up in my own research over the years.
Total estimated comic book sales per year:
1942: 180 million copies (Publishers' Weekly, 18 Apr 1942)
1943: 216 million copies (Couperie & Horn, "A History of the Comic Strip")
1953: 840 million copies (Wall Street Journal - exact citation not to hand)
1954: 1,000 million copies (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Feb 1955; also Wertham, "Seduction of the Innocent")
1971: 200 million copies (New York Times, 2 May 1971)
1974: 300 million copies (Goldwater, "Americana in Four Colors")
I'm in the process of collating figures for more recent years, but I haven't found anything for the 1960s. I'd be very interested to hear of any contemporary published sources of this kind of information.
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| Re: Some thumbnail guesses at annual circulation |
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[originally posted 10/1/2007]
Now THAT's interesting! It would be good to accumulate as many of these citations as we can -- I doubt that all of them will be equally accurate, but we can at least get enough data points to put on a scatterplot and figure out at least what people THOUGHT the market was.
I am of the impression that the 1953-54 numbers are a bit high; these feel to me closer to print runs than actual sales. Remember, with returnables, it took a long time to figure out what was actually sold. So while I highly doubt that 1974's sales were higher than 1971's, that could easily account for the difference. Figure we're going to be stuck with a "range of doubt" on the order of 40-50% on any figure where we don't know for sure whether they were referring to paid copies or copies in circulation.
You can bet any comics publisher of the day, when asked for a number by the press, would have gone with the print run. It's a number they know, and it sounds better...
Best, John Jackson Miller • Curator, The Comics Chronicles |
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