By Paul O’Brien
The May sales charts have received a lot of attention already, and we all know what the big story is: FINAL CRISIS #1 triumphed for DC, vindicating the controversial direction of their superhero imprint, and proving the critics wrong.
Oh no, hold on. That’s Earth-2.
Here in the real world, FINAL CRISIS #1 tailed in around 40,000 copies behind SECRET INVASION #2, which caused a bit of a stir. And it was a strong month for Marvel all round. In addition to the summer crossover, May also saw the release of the Iron Man movie, the conclusion of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s ASTONISHING X-MEN, and the launch of AVENGERS/INVADERS (which turns out to be a bigger deal than I’d expected).
All of this means - and if you’re a devoted DC fan, you might want to look away now - that Marvel thrashed DC yet again, with a dollar share of 43% to DC’s 28%, and a unit share of 48% to 30%. And arguably, that’s a lot more damning than just comparing the figures of SECRET INVASION and FINAL CRISIS. Of course, to be fair, there’s a strong argument that DC should be happy with being number two. After all, they’ve still got around a third of the direct market. And they have imprints like Vertigo, CMX and Minx which could be selling well in other channels - Marvel has no equivalent of those. Still, the superhero books are an important part of DC’s line, and the gap between them and Marvel is starting to look more like a chasm.
Thanks as always to Milton Griepp and ICV2 for permission to use their figures for these calculations.
1. SECRET INVASION
04/08 Secret Invasion #1 of 8 - 254,449
05/08 Secret Invasion #2 of 8 - 182,443 (-28.3%)
Marvel’s summer event book holds onto the top spot for the second month running. It has a comfortable margin over FINAL CRISIS #1, with estimated sales of 144,826. Most books tend to see their big sales drop with issue #2, so chances are that Marvel will keep the lead for the rest of the run.
The conventional interpretation is that FINAL CRISIS has underperformed. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. After all, 145K would be a comfortable number one in most months, and it’s around 35K clear of NEW AVENGERS in the third slot. So let’s look at it from the other perspective. Hasn’t SECRET INVASION done unexpectedly well?
Marvel have spent months building up this story, and at first it didn’t seem to have much impact on sales. In the last couple of months, however, things have picked up. Satellite books like MS MARVEL have seen big increases. The core title is comfortably outperforming last year’s WORLD WAR HULK, which debuted with first month sales of 178,408, before dropping to 155,322 in the second month.
If SECRET INVASION and FINAL CRISIS had both sold 145K with their first issue, nobody would have been particularly shocked by that. So let’s be fair: this gap is as much due to SECRET INVASION doing well, as FINAL CRISIS doing badly.
It’s not unqualified good news for Marvel, though. That 28% drop is on the steep side. In comparison, WORLD WAR HULK dropped 18% in its second month; CIVIL WAR, only 9%. And the re-orders aren’t spectacular. Issue #1 picks up only 4,186 extra copies (as usual, included above). However, that might be misleading - SECRET INVASION #1 came out in the first week of April, so three weeks of re-orders will have been included in the April chart.
Still, it’s possible retailers might have overdone it a bit with this series, and we might see some further downward corrections over the next few months. But even if that happens, we’re only talking about sales dropping from “astronomical” to “very good indeed.”
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