Prince Namor

And because a newsstand dealer isn't actually paying for the issues (thus the fraud), he can sell those in bulk for whatever he can get. If some wanna-be comic book dealer who is going to shows and setting up, buys 1000 copies of New Gods #1 for 8 cents each, and then sells it at shows for 20 cents - at least - he's making 12 cents per book - that $120 in 1970, the equivalent of $969 today. You do that with enough hot books... It's the same kind of thing people were doing at Capital Distribution before they shut down... buying copies of hot books right out the back door in bulk prices from employees that were stealing from the company. 'Wherever there's an opportunity, there will be fraudsters.'

Not denying that at all.

For books released in January 1970 until May of 1971, it's interesting to see how many are on the census (even though the census has zero to do with the Statement of Publication numbers), but just in terms of the popularity... this list is incomplete, but it does include all the Spider-man issues 83-99 and FF and Thor and Iron Man... Conan #1 - 6411 Batman #232 - 3820 GL/GA #76 -2872 New Gods #1 - 2775 Forever People #1 - 2668 FF #112 - 2491 Batman #227 - 2432 Jimmy Olsen #134 - 2397 GL/GA #87 - 2386 ASM #97 - 2173 ASM #98 - 2038 Mr. Miracle - 1918 Batman #234 - 1957 Detective Comics #400 - 1587 Superman #233 - 1532 Hulk #141 - 1484 Conan #3 - 1343 Avengers #87 - 1233 Detective Comics #411 - 1156 Avengers #83 - 1149

FTFY After Marvel never led in sales throughout the entire decade of the 60's... including 1970 and 1971... it took the creation of the direct market, the glutting of reprints and the inability of comics to hold the newsstand interest vs the price, to even give Marvel a chance...and finally the complete collapse of any common sense by DC Comics in pricing themselves - once at 25 cents for a year vs Marvel's 20 cents but then a second time a year later with their 60 page Giants priced at 60 cents, before finally conceding to let them drop to 50 cents - before Marvel could finally say, "Hey look at us! We're number one!" Hey, they had their rabid fan base to keep them going. Still... at that point it was like saying, "Look at us! We're less inept than the rest of the industry!" They sure showed DC Comics! Meanwhile... DC Comics had the Top Rated Batman TV Show from 1966-67 (and in syndication for years after) - The Super Friends TV Cartoon in 1973, and then in some form from 1977 to 1985, The Box Office success of FOUR Superman movies from 1978 to 1987 - Batman TV Cartoons that ran from 1968 to 1977 - The Box Office success of FOUR Batman movies that ran from 1989 to 1997 - The AWARD WINNING Batman the Animated Series TV Cartoon that ran from 1992 to 1995... Heck, they were REBOOTING a second Batman series when Marvel got their movie situation finally going.... All while DC Comics rebuilt their comic company and produced most of the better comics of the mid/late 80's into the 90's... Dark Knight Returns, Batman Year One, Watchmen, Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, etc.... Whenever I hear people talk about Stan Lee 'saving comics' or 'making it all more popular', I just think... What??? Comics were ALREADY popular in the early 60's. Superhero Fanzines began BEFORE FF#1 came out. People were already writing to Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger before they ever knew Stan Lee existed. Superman averaged 823,829 comics sold per month in 1965 (the year BEFORE the Batman TV Show), which wasn't much different than the 810,000 comics sold per month that the book averaged in 1960. (The other 6 Superman Family titles averaged a combined 3 million in sales). Their Top 8 titles per year, would continue to beat Marvel's Top 8 titles per year through 1973 (at that pint only by about 160,000 total copies...). And not long after, both DC and Marvel were on the brink of going bankrupt in the late 70's, early 80's... Star Wars and the Direct Market saved Marvel, not Stan Lee. HE did what he did best - he sold STAN LEE as a brand to the fans, who kept on collecting on the SECONDARY market. But Marvel was able to regroup and slowly win back some of them... New fans came on board because of the creative talent - Miller, Byrne, Simonson, etc. - while the diehards eagerly scooped up Secret Wars or whatever garbage Marvel threw at them with 'Stan Lee Presents' on it. Collectibility... NOT content, was Marvel's real goal. As far as comic books go... it hasn't aged well. The portion of the collecting community that is about 'reading' is probably as small as it's ever been.

Strong evidence? You said it yourself: 'Wherever there's an opportunity, there will be fraudsters.' Even today, what do the fraudsters go after? The books most in demand. It's 'human nature'.

It's weird how nostalgia and talking about different things can make you remember something that is completely forgotten... Tin Tin was something I didn't read until much later... probably the mid-90's, but it reminded me of something that I couldn't quite... put together that I read in the mid-70's. I didn't have the research tools in the mid-90's that I do now of course, so someone mentioning it, made me do some searching and... Does anyone remember Trots and Bonnie from National Lampoon? Wow... I went and did some research on this and... man, was it controversial.... yet relatively unknown! It's probably what influenced my interest in alternative/independant comics of the 90's (I also didn't get into Crumb and the others until then). Some of it is probably offensive by today's standard's, but as 12-13 year old kid in the 70's, my eyes were wide open. No way it would've been printed in a regular comic at the time... Spoilered.... to keep from 'offending' anyone...

People forget how big Richie Rich was. Harvey had at one time in the 70's, like 5 different Richie Rich comics. Never heard that. The whole premise of Archie is him having the hots for any attractive girl that he sees.

For Mad Magazine in the 60's: 1961: 1,209,918 1962: 1,293,705 1963: 1,429,080 1964: 1,424,628 1965: 1,532,926 1966: 1,635,612 1967: 1,789,555 1968: 1,831,648 1969: 1,884,502 and then per John Jackson Miller at Comichron.com: "(MAD Magazine) The title reached its peak circulation in 1974, the culminating year for Watergate, with average sales per issue of 2,132,655 copies...."

Well, except for Jimmy Olsen which was the beginning of the 4th World. The others wouldn't have made this list anyway. Or the next one. 1972 would cover roughly July/August of 1971 to July/August of 1972. They were only on their fourth issue by then and wouldn't have had a Statement of Publication anyway. Most of the publisher's did not add new titles going into the 70's. Marvel added... none until Ghost Rider and Spider Woman in 1979. Never saw a Statement of Publication in the 70's for Tomb of Dracula, Defenders, Captain Marvel, IRON MAN, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-In-One, Master of Kung Fu, Werewolf by Night.... so it wasn't uncommon. If anyone runs into one for any of these, please let me know.

1971's TOP COMICS from Statement of Publication - Total Paid Circulation Archie Comics flagship title reigns again for the 3rd year in a row as the #1 seller in America. Betty & Veronica jumps to 4th. DC takes up 6 of the other Top 10 spots, but again only Superman has the numbers to challenge Archie. This is with DC's numbers including 2 - 2 1/2 months of the 25 cent price jump. It'll really hit them in the next report. Marvel has Amazing Spider-man at #9 for the 2nd year in a row, even though the numbers drop 15,000 copies a month - it's pretty consistent that almost ALL of the numbers drop across the board because of the price increase, so essentially, it stayed the same. The Fantastic Four minus Kirby holds steady losing only 10,000 more copies a month (it lost 55,000 it's first report without Kirby), but again this is more inline with the price increase and almost a POSITIVE to hold - it's still outsold by Kirby's Jimmy Olsen by almost 25,000 copies a month though. Thor without Kirby loses another 47,000 copies per month on top of 34,000 copies per month from the previous year and... falls to #34. Both these books will decline in sales for the entire decade. Marvel and DC are both again mostly MIA in 11-20, as only the FF shows up and Jimmy Olsen, with Archie Comics absolutely dominating sales - six of the Ten spots. Dennis the Menace and Harvey's Richie Rich make it. Batman drops out of it from last year, falling to #22 (down almost 50,000 copies a month). Casper the Friendly Ghost sells about the same as Batman. Adams on Green Lantern? Hey, it went UP, 8,000 copies a month. Keep using your Detective skills to help me edit my work! I appreciate the help! And the questions - and the opinions... I'm entertained by this information and it's fun to talk about...

Not sure about the Doctor Strange, but as I edit these things I'm making my corrections. Detective has been added, but yeah, sales weren't so great. Couple of notes: This is from Total Paid Circulation There'd be no reason to INFLATE numbers, as that would open a business up to being audited if it didn't match up. It is a FELONY to falsify postal records. These are from books printed that came out in January/February 1971. Date of report October 1st, 1970. So for books released, roughly, from August of 1969 to August of 1970, which would include Green Lantern #72 to Green Lantern #81 (4 issues without and 6 issues WITH Adams). Yes, the report is from Green Lantern #83. It would be very interesting to see what Marvel's reprint book numbers were. Haven't seen a single one yet, other than when Sgt. Fury was every other reprint and it's numbers were strong. As far as the validity of these numbers, Giordano wasn't the person making these reports - for Charlton, it was John Santangelo and his son, the owner and publisher. So if he was falsifying records, that would've been on him. Charlton, by this time, had such a small impact in the market, they only did a handful of reports any way, so it doesn't make much difference. At DC, again, it wouldn't have been Giordano who had anything to do with filing these reports. You can read who it is: in this case Bernard Kashdan, who'd been in the accounting department at DC Comics since the 40's. (He was the brother of editor/writer George Kashdan. Having dealt with these numbers over a period of two decades - 1960 to 1979 - there are certain consistencies you can see that wipe out any number polishing - these people had no idea these numbers would be viewed side to side and examined in a way to see if they hold up... when the price of comics goes up, you can see the numbers sag evenly across the board - when a John Byrne takes over the FF, you can see the numbers go up... so across the board, with a sample size this big - the validity of most of these numbers stands up really well. And the idea that DC would fudge their numbers and someone like Stan Lee WOULDN'T is just typical 'my team is better' nonsense. If one publisher was doing it, they all would've. It was only a FELONY. But as for how they stack up overall across the history of them being posted... hey, I'll let the expert answer that (John Jackson Miller) from his web site comichron.com: Q: How valid is the information in comic book Statements of Ownership? A: Validity differs from reliability in that it answers the question, "is this statistic really reporting what it says it is?" And whether Statements are telling the real sales truth has been a subject of debate for many years, since fans started collecting them in the 1960s as a means of figuring out which comics were selling the best. It's a federal crime to falsify the numbers — so, in theory, you might expect the information to be accurate. But there have been cases where negligence or misunderstanding led to errors in the Statements — and there have been many occasions where computational errors have crept in. (Easily rectified errors have been corrected for the Comics Chronicles reports.) While there have been suspicions from time to time of publishers fiddling with their Statements to improve their numbers or because of apathy — MR. Giordano said that Charlton simply "made them up" during his editorship in the late 1960s — little evidence has been found of it being widespread, especially as other sources of comics circulation figures have become available for comparison. Gross exaggeration would have to be done uniformly across time and across several information channels not to be seen. And, the filing of Statements is, again, a postal obligation, usually more of a bookkeeping afterthought than an opportunity to market a publisher's sales story. It's the advertisers who care most about how many copies publishers are selling — and those people are getting their information from audit bureaus, not the backs of comic books!

For those who DON'T believe there was affidavit fraud... Charlton's Cheyenne Kid outsold a Neal Adams Green Lantern...

Heck they won't believe it NOW! They'll make up some excuse!

In the process of writing TWO books at once so... sorry if I've gotten behind here (one of them with a deadline)... hope this helps in the meantime!

In the process of writing TWO books at once so... sorry if I've gotten behind here... hope this helps!