On Friday, May 9th, Diamond Comics Distributors announced the top comics for April, 2014, and the results are that the newly relaunched Amazing Spider-Man #1 was the best-selling comic for the month “in both units and dollars in over a decade.” Well, the sales estimates have now been tabulated, and as reported by ICv2:
Sales to comic stores on Amazing Spider-Man #1 in April came in at 532,586, topping the 500,000 that Marvel announced a month ago (see “Over 500,000 ‘Amazing Spider-Man‘ #1“). That puts the total dollars generated by this title at over $3.19 million, nearly double the dollars from Amazing Spider-Man #700, at $1.6 million, and a record for any title since the 90s.
Since these numbers, because of the way they’re calculated, do not include sales through Diamond UK, the total print run for the book probably approached 600,000.
Furthermore, as explained by Joshua Jackson Miller of Comichron:
The sales of the previous leader, Amazing Spider-Man #583, sales reached 530,500 copies over the course of an entire calendar year in 2009; Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 3 #1’s sales already top it. Unless something happens to reduce the total — like Diamond accepting a lot of returns because of damaged copies — we should expect it to hold its position relative to #583.
Note that these estimates do not include digital comic sales.
Sources: Diamond Comics Distributors, ICv2, Comichron, and Comics Beat
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#4 Yep — I just bought all 5 variants of 1991 X-Men #1 from an online comic store for a total of $5.50 plus shipping. Thought it would be kind of cool to have the Best Selling Comic of All Time for a conversation piece since the price was right.
Considering that the number of variants was well into the double digits, this is not really that surprising.
There are so many copies you’ll find them in quarter bins in short time. 🙂
1991 the new release of X-Men #1 in 5 new covers written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Jim Lee. Shipping with four variant covers priced at $1.50, and a special gatefold cover combining all four and printed on higher quality paper selling for $3.95, X-Men #1 sold nearly 8.1 million copies with the combined sales of all five editions. That gave Marvel’s 1991 X-Men #1 The Guinness World Record Best Selling Comic Of All Time.
Do the digital download codes included with the hard copy of the issue count for digital sales?
Weren’t there several variant covers? That’s gotta play a role.