Was Man of Steel necessary?

In his “Meanwhile…” editorial* in the back of Man of Steel #1 Dick Giordano comments  that he shared with John Byrne “a common goal: to return Superman to his rightful place in the universe.” Which made me think about what Superman’s place was in the universe was in 1986. We can discuss issues about coolness, backstory complexity, and public perception until the cows come home, but for a commercial entity like DC Comics the bottom line will always be the bottom line. And we have access to at least a portion of the information that describes it.

First we need to establish a baseline – what were the overall sales of the big name brands prior to the Man of Steel relaunch. For this we go to the circulation statements** – legal notices magazines had to include to receive a special mailing rate for subscriptions – and these notices included the average monthly sales for the previous year. Like any such public reporting system the numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt for any particular issue, but they should track the general sales pattern. Below is a figure comparing the Batman and Superman DC sales versus three of Marvel’s strongest selling titles.

The first thing you notice is the steady year-on-year rise of the X-Men and that even Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny/X-Men was averaging a quarter million units a month. They look at DC’s flag ships: a slow year-on-year downward drift until 1985. In fact sales of DC’s books across the entire market place – and remember the massive news-stand network was still fairly strong – is comparable to todays tiny direct market. No wonder the company decided that something dramatic had to be done!

The statements always report the last year’s figures so that massive jump of the four DC titles in 1987 is actually for the comics sold the previous year – the year coming out of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. They trebled sales of Action Comics and almost doubled Superman’s sales so somebody must have been happy. Unfortunately the circulation statements seem to peter out after 1987 so we’ll have to look elsewhere if we want to continue the story.

Of course I’ve left off DC’s bigger sellers at the time – the New Teen Titans and the Legion of Superheroes – but I wanted to concentrate on Superman franchise.

*Remember those? Fantastic mini-essays that appeared in the back of DC Comics during the 1980s. A more sober, more informative forerunner to the more bombastic DC Nation column that wastes space in the back of DC’s current comics (Come on Dan Didio turn that thing into a blog on the DC website and give us and extra page of story).**Source: Standard Catalog of Comic Books 2nd Edition