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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 11:11am | IP Logged | 1 post reply

I just asked IDW to change the copy on their ad for the upcoming ARTIFACT EDITION. The first few lines are all about what a huge HIT the book was under Dace Cockrum, and how it became even bigger when I started.

This is a popular misconception that has vexed me for too long. It is, I suspect, the origin of the "Byrne's stuff doesn't sell anymore" self-fulfilling prophecy, as dealers and retailers looked at the sales during my tenure on FANTASTIC FOUR (averaging over 250,000 per issue), compared them to the X-MEN at the time (around 400,000), and, assuming X-MEN had "always" sold that well, further assumed my star had gone out.

In fact, when I was doing UNCANNY, we were lucky to get above 130,000. The big sales on X-MEN were generated by the Speculator Boom, which was itself based on a false perception of how comics sold.

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Robbie Parry
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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 11:51am | IP Logged | 2 post reply

I am glad you have asked IDW to change the copy on their ad.

An anecdote like this reminds me to take some things with a pinch of salt - and either research or go to the source.
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Michael Sommerville
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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Those issues seem to me to be a hit because of the interest in them a few years after they came out. I remember, when I was young, that all the Byrne X-men comics where very expensive to buy and were always on the walls of any shop I saw. It was not one or two special issues in the run but all of them.  This was a time before reprints, trades and fewer speculators. The only others that were comparable seemed to be FM Daredevil. 
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Karl Wiebe
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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

Ha ha Michael we must be the same age, I had the EXACT same experience in comic book stores when I was young.  Every JB comic for X-Men was on the wall, and every JB Fantastic Four book was in the regular back issue bin.  Lucky me, I got to grab all the FF and read them within 2 years of being published, and it was only many years later (through reprints) that I ever got to read the X-Men JB run.  
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

That's a lot of what's wrong with the DSM right there. Too many retailers still sunk in dealer mentality, wanting the books to sell themselves.
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Adam Schulman
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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

I guess I was fool enough to think that in the 1980s, when UNCANNY X-MEN sold 400,000 copies a month (right?), that meant 400,000 readers.
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Kevin Sharp
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Posted: 12 July 2018 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | 7 post reply

I remember, when I was young, that all the Byrne X-men comics where very expensive to buy and were always on the walls of any shop I saw.

***

I was just writing on my blog about how hard it was to find a copy of #133 ("the Wolverine issue"). I came to the title at the time of Cockrum 2.0 but had been able to track down copies of the rest of JB's run... except that one damn issue. 

I literally would've had an easier time getting my hands on an X-M #1 during this period!
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Mal Gardiner
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Posted: 13 July 2018 at 1:25am | IP Logged | 8 post reply


I was just writing on my blog about how hard it was to find a copy of #133 ("the Wolverine issue"). I came to the title at the time of Cockrum 2.0 but had been able to track down copies of the rest of JB's run... except that one damn issue.
————————————————————————————————

Kevin, that was the first comic I tracked down in a comic store and was happy to pay whatever to get a copy. It was the only one of JB’s run after 122 that I missed on the newsstand; I managed to find a copy in a Sydney comic shop in 1986 for the princely sum of $14, and I had trouble explaining why I spent that much to the minister of home finance... The rest of his run I managed to get hold of before they became the most popular books on the planet - even so, average prices around $4 or $5 per issue seemed steep then but absurd now...

*edited spelling*


Edited by Mal Gardiner on 13 July 2018 at 1:28am
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

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Posted: 13 July 2018 at 4:09am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

I guess I was fool enough to think that in the 1980s, when UNCANNY X-MEN sold 400,000 copies a month (right?), that meant 400,000 readers.

•••

That waa something noted at the time. Back when Stan and Jack were selling 400,000 units per month of FANTASTIC FOUR they were reasonably sure it meant 400,000 readers, so losing even 100,000 would not have been devastating.

But when X-MEN was selling 400,000 and more, it likely meant around 100,000 customers doing the buying. To lose even 50,000 would have been catastrophic.

How well I remember Rob Liefeld quantifying the "correct" way to buy a title: one to read, one to save, one as an investment.

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Dale E Ingram
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Posted: 13 July 2018 at 7:15am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

Rob's quote would explain the early 1990s.

I've seen several articles online recently about the sales dominance of the X-Men in the 80s and 90s, and what a "runaway monster hit" the book was. And that's not what I remember it being at all. I remembered gradual growing interest in the book over several years.

Out of curiosity, I've recently started plotting the actual sales numbers, compiled from the Statements of Ownership in the books in the 70s and 80s, and the data available from the Comichron website, in an Excel spreadsheet and then charting that out in a graph form.

It's incomplete and probably slightly inaccurate in places, but the remarkable thing that sticks out to me is how gradual the increase in sales was over time. The biggest single "jumps" were around the time the book went monthly, and then towards the end of JB's run there's a bit of a noticeable increase. 

This is ignoring the ridiculous unrealistic spikes in the early 1990s.

It would make sense that the book gained readers over time, but not of the magnitude that is reflected in these numbers. Makes more sense that for every one new reader, a retailer ordered 2-3 extra copies for the back issue market, thinking they'd go up in value and they could sell 'em later.
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

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Posted: 13 July 2018 at 7:26am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Yes, it is necessary to factor the shops into this. The DSM was itself a buyer, and those comics were non-returnable. Fine for the companies, but still very much artificially inflating the numbers.

It was around this time we began hearing the phrase "sell-thru", which was a more accurate gauge of the sales. (Here, too, we see something that had a huge negative impact on my own career, when shops refused to order those books that "didn't sell anymore.")

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Dale E Ingram
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Posted: 13 July 2018 at 7:38am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

Yeah, and at some point around 1995, they realized that the X-Men "didn't sell anymore" and the sales contracted back to where they were near the beginning of your run, eventually contracting further til now, when the total number of buyers is somewhere only slightly higher than what Subscriptions were during the 80s.


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