Paul O’Brien’s analysis of Marvel’s month-to-month sales for August 2007 are up. I’ll quote at length from his writeup about Amazing Spider-Man, but there’s a lot of good analysis here about other stuff, too:
For all practical purposes, this was the last month of the three separate Spider-Man titles. Amazing, Sensational and Friendly all tied up their storylines, leaving the way clear for One More Day.
The original plan, you’ll recall, was that One More Day would run weekly through all three Spider-Man books in September. Sensational and Friendly would then be cancelled [sic], and in October, Amazing would come out three times a month instead. In other words, the three existing Spider-Man monthlies are going to be merged into a one book, shipping 36 times a year.
Unfortunately, One More Day has gone off the scheduling rails, and so the new Amazing has been pushed back to December. That book can hardly ship extra issues to catch up, so effectively the delay to One More Day has cost two months of Spider-Man sales. It’ll have to perform very well to justify that.
Now, as we all know, Amazing sells a lot better than its two siblings. Plainly, the hope is that Spider-Man fans will buy every issue of the merged title, while before they just bought Amazing nine times a year, and ignored the two satellite books. But it’s also likely that some existing readers of Amazing will decide that they don’t want to buy 36 issues a year, or that they’re jumping ship with the outgoing creative team. So, how well does the new Amazing need to sell, in order to be judged a success?
Well, the short answer is that Marvel will come out ahead if the merged title shifts more copies than Amazing, Friendly and Sensational are presently managing between them. But then, Amazing doesn’t ship twelve times a year—it misses issues all over the place and never catches them up. So let’s take the whole last year as our comparison. Between September 2006 and August 2007, the three existing Spider-Man titles sold an estimated total of 2,284,676 copies in the direct market. At 36 issues a year, the new Amazing can equal total by selling an average of 63,463 copies per issue. Which isn’t really that much. It can do that without making the top 30. I’d be very surprised if the merged book fails to beat that target.
I’m not a fan of the One More Day concept, but I think the idea of moving to a single Spider-Man book that ships more often, rather than three separate, unrelated ones, is very interesting. That said, I don’t think that I’ll buy 36 issues of Amazing Spider-Man a year.