UK Comic Sales Figures - January to June 2016

[johnfreeman96]

I've just posted my piece on the latest figures for UK young children's /comic titles: http://downthetubes.net/?p=33120

Some good and bad news for publishers. Note that the major "comics" - ie titles that are wall to wall comic such as The Beano - didn't report in this period, we'll get those later in the year. 2000AD, Phoenix and Commando don't report.

While titles like LEGO Star Wars (which has more strip pages than, say, TOXIC) and Astonishing Spider-Man utilise strip material from other sources (US reprint in the case of ASM), they do at least indicate that you can still achieve good sales for such titles.

Unfortunately the costs of creating originated comics like those some of us on this forum grew up with seems to still be seen as a barrier. Which is odd when you think that these publishers, by buying in their material for LEGO comics from a central source, are now doing what other countries used to do - but our strop material for reprint in their comics. There just aren't the staff at these publishers to conduct those sales drives which would offset production costs as they did with Valiant, Lion, Eagle, 2000AD etc.

[philcom55]

Comic economics baffle me. American comic books now sell a tiny fraction of what would have been their break-even point in the 1950s and 1960s - yet they can somehow afford to employ top illustrators like Alex Ross and authors who write 'New York Times Best-Sellers'. Do these really make a profit, or are they just a way of coming up with new ideas for big budget films?