Median Comic Book Cover Prices By Year

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Median Comic Book Cover Prices by Year
Median cover prices of all comics offered in the United States by All Publishers, and by specific ones, from 1961 to present

Readers of Comics Buyer's Guide may remember the "What Price, Comics?" column I ran in #1619, the August 2006 issue. As supporting material, I ran an analysis of what the median prices were for comics across four groups from 1960 to 2005: all comics published in the year, all Marvel comics, all DC comics, and all Archie comics. I presented them visually, with my commentary and the actual cover price stamps, as seen in these three images below.

For month-by month pricing since 1995, see Cover Prices By Month.

Vital Statistics

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Up until 1961, comic books were mostly priced at 10 cents in the United States. The median prices of comics during most of those years can be found at right.

For month-by month pricing since 1995, see Cover Prices By Month.

— John Jackson Miller

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THE FINE PRINT

The monthly sales estimates at right are for comics shipped by Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest comic-book distributor in North America.

Diamond publishes "indexed" sales figures, in which it keys orders for all comics it lists sales for to a single comic book (usually Batman), with one “order index point” being equal to 1% of that title’s orders. We use the actual Diamond final orders from titles accounting for more than 25% of Diamond’s Top 300 to approximate what an order index point equals each month. The result is applied to the Diamond charts to produce the estimates seen at right.

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