ttfitz

I suggest asking Hibbs if he thinks comic sales are at an "all time high." Having talked to him on a number of occasions, I doubt it, he's a pretty smart man. (EDIT - I should also point out for completeness sake that the estimated billion comics sold was only the traditional comics, and wouldn't include any sort of things that Hibbs' report included. No clue whether that would change things much, but it doesn't really matter.)

My hope is you are being disingenuous, and not that you are completely unaware that "some" is a relative term. Yes, for a dinner party at home, 89 is "a lot." But to use your reasoning, :"Wow, there were a lot of people at the Michigan football game this week." "Oh, yeah? How many?" "EIGHTY-NINE!"

You're on a roll!

It's not some people. Again, almost everyone on this board equates superhero comics with comics more broadly. Thanks for that link - not only does it not contradict what I've been responding to (as in, I haven't claimed anything about what your second sentence says, at all), but it supports it. I know Brian Hibbs (the author of the link), and I trust what he says. So... "Some people" - From the article: "These 89 people [selling 100K copies] represent 62% of all sales of NPD BookScan-reported sales in 2022. What you can take from this is that only a tiny number [emphasis mine] of creators drive the vast majority of the business in comics (and books in general, as far as I can tell); and conversely, this probably means that the numerical majority of comics published aren’t actually significantly profitable any given year." Comic sales at an "all time high"? "But, as amazing as those topline numbers look, please remember that it really is largely “hits” that are driving the business – the “average” book still only sold approximately 1,051 copies, nationwide, in the entire year. Almost no one can earn a living from that (including book sellers!)" Finally, as to your earlier statement that you were talking about "gross sales", Hibbs places the "calculated retail value" as $863,574,176 for 2022. From this article on the same website as your link - "Certainly they help make sense of the trajectory that led Publishers Weekly in a 1954 article to place annual comics sales above 1 billion." So, at 10¢ per comic, that would be $100,000,000 in 1954 dollars, or $1,089,962,756 (according to the inflation calculator on the Minn fed page) in 2022. So, not an "all time high" by that measure, either.

Ah, I see where the problem is - you responded to my disputing that "comic sales are at an all time high" to say that "comics are selling well for some people" which I've never argued with.

Dav Pilkey's top 9 comics sold more than 3.3 million copies in 2022, and the "long tail" of his lesser selling books added another 400,000 copies. His top comic in 2021 sold 1.3 million copies. That's not far off the circulations of peak issues in the 1940s. Is that 1.3 million copies a month, or 1.3 million copies total? Because those examples I gave were for each month - so over the course of the year, we're talking 8-12 million copies. And that was just those few titles - I wouldn't be surprised to find that every comic published today would have been canceled for poor sales back then. And also note that I am not trying to say there aren't any comics that don't do well or make a profit for their publisher, just that any sort of definition of "all time high" for comic sales now is just ridiculous.

So you are talking dollar volume? Yeah, I guess if you continually raise your prices, you can claim an "all time record" in sales. Not really sure that proves anything about the health of the industry, but maybe that's just me. Although I will note that 10¢ in 1940 had the same buying power as $2.15 now, so if you adjusted for inflation it probably still wouldn't be a true statement.

I don't know what current comic sales are, but I'm guessing this is true only if "all time" only goes back a decade or two. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and others regularly sold over a million copies a month in the 40s.

Curious if you are still able to access the purchase information and images from the purchases back as far as 2013?

I think my history with MCS actually goes back to about 2009. I was speaking here, of course, of my experience under their MCS name; my first experience with Lone Star Comics goes back to the late 80s. My wife worked for Mobil Oil in their headquarters in Fairfax, VA, and occasionally had to go to Dallas on business (for those fans of the television show Dallas, Ewing Oil's headquarters was the Mobil Oil building). I went with her one time, and spent part of my time while she was working visiting various Dallas/Fort Worth comic shops, including many Lone Star locations. I discovered then how availability could have a regional component - many times I would look thru the back issue bins with my want list in hand, and discover long runs of stuff I needed, with the stuff I already had missing. Even better, at the time Lone Star had a thing where they would put a colored sticker on a book when it went in their stock, and as time went by a particular color would go on sale. I probably needed to get a new suitcase to bring all the books I bought on that trip home!

Another thing I find very valuable is that MCS keeps an online history of your purchases. I can sort it by title or by date and see everything I ever purchased from them going back to my first purchase in July 2019. Can't say whether it was my first purchase from them, but my order history goes back to 2013. EDIT - October 24, 2013, so just passed a decade (at least) of being a customer!

I'm with you there - an uncut pizza that can be heated up at home on the pizza stone is one of the great pleasures of life. Okay, you're back on the good-egg list.

I used to have a very high opinion of you, but knowing that you heat up pizza in the microwave? I may have to rethink my opinion....

Do you know what year it was? 1970's? 1980's? I might have known at one point in time, but nearly 40 years later, I don't really remember.

See, what did I tell you about the hair?

My first boss out of college (so around that time) owned a Porsche. Although I think it spent as much time in the shop as it did the company parking lot....

Roy has better hair than Annie, though.

Once they get your books ready for sale, you then set your price. They give you a good bit of guidance to help you out, things like what is currently listed on their site, recent sales, etc. Here's an example:

I hope you didn't take offense (my "Mr Pedantic" sig was supposed to humorously indicate that I was just being picky) - my main point was that most states with sales taxes charge them regardless of whether the retailer collects it or not, it just becomes your responsibility to pay when they don't. Although compliance isn't very good, it seems - according to an article from NPR, "Forty-five states have a use tax. About 1.6 percent of the taxpayers in those 45 states actually pay the use tax."

To be clear, those dealers do not charge sales tax, they collect it. Your state charges the sales tax, and if yours is like mine (Virginia) even if the seller did not collect it, you are still liable for it. Each year when I file my state income taxes I am required to pay any taxes on out-of-state purchases that were not collected by the seller. Mr. Pedantic

Haven't seen this posted here, so thought I'd pass it along From deadline.com: Keith Giffen, a veteran writer and artist whose work included DC’s Lobo and the Jamie Reyes version of the Blue Beetle and Marvel’s Rocket Raccoon, has died at the age of 70. His death was affirmed by longtime collaborator Paul Levitz on Facebook. The family of the comics veteran announced his death on Facebook Wednesday via a sardonic post pre-written by Giffen: A stroke was attributed as the cause of death. I met him a few years ago in Baltimore, and I said to him, about his Legion of Super-Heroes work, I couldn't decide at the time whether I loved it or hated it. His response, "Good, that's what I was going for." So it goes.

Ouch. I remember enjoying this series back when it came out, but I didn't have to go thru 20 in a row, so maybe better in small doses?

Previous total - 927 After the 500 last month, a real slowdown this month as I caught up on a number of other things. DC Comics Presents 1-2, 9, 26, 47, 53, 69 Continuing my Superman related reading, picking up the few issues of this pre-Crisis Superman team-up title that I hadn't read before. Nothing really to comment on, other than the first New Teen Titans preview, and the first DC comics appearance of He-Man, Master of the Universe. Invincible 80-84 Finishing off the trade paperback collection, still a very fun title. Amazing Spider-Man 283-289 Web of Spider-Man 21-28 Spectacular Spider-Man 122-129, Annual 6 Picking up where I left off with the Spider-Man titles. Wow, so Ned Leeds was the Hobgoblin! Glad that finally got straightened out! So looks like that brings me to ... 963 for the year.

. Yeah, as long as you don't care about whether it is legal or not. I find it best to support the comics I like, so they will continue to be made. If you aren't buying the books in some form - or subscribing to a site like comicology/marvel unlimited/Prime Reading etc - and you have a library card, you should check to see if your library subscribes to Hoopla (hoopladigitial.com), where you can read a great many comics that are both free and legal.

A few years ago at the Baltimore Comic Con, I was looking at some books from Tomorrow's Treasures / Richie Munchin and asked about taking them out of the bag. When I did and was counting pages and checking for cutouts, my daughter smiled and said, "I love that old comic smell." Couldn't have been prouder.