As you'll no doubt have noticed, it's been a while since I did one of these posts. I'm probably going to stop doing them as a strict monthly thing, as I'm really not sure how useful they are. If you simply want to see the month-by-month sales figures, I recommend using the excellent ComicChron site. These numbers don't always seem terribly representative for Pony in any case; for example, main-series issue #12, which at the time looked as though it had sold rather poorly, suddenly added over 7,000 copies in January!
However, what I will do now is a bit of analysis. First, let's look at 2013's overall sales. This was the first full year of the IDW comics, so we can get a reasonable idea. Unsurprisingly, the best-selling issue was the year's first, #3, which ended up in 407th spot with 48,900 sales. Most of the other issues also made the top 1,000 – and seeing as you needed to sell over 27,800 to do that, things look good. The first two Micro-series comics also managed that, with Twilight's debut hitting 38,800 copies sold. Pony wasn't top of the IDW list as Powerpuff Girls #1 sold 54,500, but the rest of the publisher's top ten was ponified.
On the book front, the first graphic novel anthology managed to become a top-50 book (no. 49) selling a highly impressive 10,300 copies to make it IDW's best seller, well ahead of the 7,700 sales for Lovecraft. The second volume was in 132nd with sales of 5,700, while the first Digest and The Magic Begins book based on the early S1 show episodes also broke the 5,000-copy mark. The third main-series anthology, Pony Tales volume 1 and the second Digest were the other MLP titles to make it into the top 1,000 books for the year.
In short? Although the My Little Pony comics are not doing quite as well as they did in their early days, they are still IDW's most popular titles – and by a large margin. Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, which are newer, are now selling 8-10,000, far short of what MLP still racks up. The future of the comics seems assured for the time being; they remain, by IDW standards at least, a remarkable phenomenon.
I hope you keep posting these, as I haven't found anywhere else that reports on how well the comics are doing. That's some impressively consistent italicisation, by the way ;)
ReplyDeleteOh, I'll definitely still keep making posts about comic sales. I'm just going to be putting a bit less emphasis on each individual month and a bit more emphasis on trends and comparisons. Actually, I have a post in the works that compares MLP sales to some other titles, and the results are quite interesting...
DeleteAs for the italicisation, I tend to do that automatically; I even used to do it in the old days when I had to write HTML for my websites in Notepad! :P