Box Score Reprise 1: Lev Gleason

Mark Twain said there are 3 kinds of lies:  Lies, Damn Lies, & Statistics.  You can add marketing to that.

Crime Does Not Pay (December 1947) [Lev Gleason Publications Inc.]

Note that this cover says "6 Million Readers Monthly".  That may be a lie and it may not be as studies at the time found that kids did trade and pass around their comic books in the late 1940s.  But we can guesstimate how many kids had to read each copy.

During the last 6 months of 1947, Lev Gleason Publications Inc., was publishing just 4 titles, Boy, Crime Does Not Pay, Daredevil, and Horse Feathers.  According to the SM News Box Score I posted not long ago, Lev Gleason had 9 issues and a total circulation of 6.48 million with an average sale per issue of 720,000.  So its impossible that each issue of Crime Does Not Pay sold 6 million copies as it had six issues during that time.

The issues covered by that time frame may have been three issues of Boy (#35-37)  and six issues of Crime Does Not Pay (#53-58).  But three issue of Daredevil Comics (#43-45) were also out in the last half of 1947.  The indicia name in Daredevil is Daredevil Publishers Inc. even though it is at the same 114 East 32nd St. address as Lev Gleason.  So maybe it was treated separately by SM News even though it was all one company.

Also coming out in this time period was Horse Feathers #1 (Nov. 1947), which also does not seem to have been counted.  It could be that not all the titles or issues were submitted to The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).  Its odd that some titles omitted from the SM News numbers, but its possible at least Horse Feathers wasn't submitted to the ABC since it's second issue didn't come out until April 1948.  Maybe it was intended to be a one-shot.

In any event, if the 6 million number has any validity, every child that bought a copy shared it with more than other 8 children for each of those 9 issues that were published.  Or maybe shared it with more than 10 others, if it is just referring to Crime Does Not Pay.  But it obvious that the 6 million is not referring to actual sales.

This exercise does demonstrate some of the limitations of the SM News Box Score and the way publishers conducted business.  Too much extrapolation from a single set of data can sometimes be misleading.

Box Score 1949 prt 2

Here are the two interior pages from the S-M News Box Score that I started in a previous post.  It covers circulation for the last 6 months of 1948 & 1947.

A few things to point out on the Magazine Groups listing which is where most of the comics are listed.  Looking at 1948,  If you change the focus of the ranking to Avg Sale Per Issue for each company, it changes the list quite a bit.  Here's the companies ranking by Avg Sale Per Issue with their Total Sales Ranking after it in brackets:

- Lev Gleason Comic Group  [6]
- Archie Comic Group  [8]
- United Feature Comic Group  [11]
- National Comics Group  (DC)   [1]
- Harvey Comics Group  [7]
- Fawcett Comics Group  [3]
- Hillman Comic Group  [10]
- The Thrilling Comics Group   (Standard/Better)  [5]
- Quality Comic Group  [4]
- Marvel Comic Group  [2]
- American Comic Group  (ACG)  [9]
- Famous Funnies-New Heroic Comics  [13]
- The Premium Group of Comics  (Novelty)  [12]

Note that Marvel drops from #2 to #10.  Demonstrates quite clearly how Goodman liked to glut the market with product.

Another fact to point out is that if you took the Avg Sale Per Issue of the Lev Gleason Comics (703,178), and plugged it into the main list of publications, it would have been #26 on the list.  In fact, if you had done that for every one of the Comic Groups, they all would have fit in the top 100.  Since each of the Comic Groups consisted of 2 or more comic book titles, had you actually broken the comics down into titles, you can image how overwhelmed the top 100 would have been with comic book titles.  Once again, this is without Dell Comics and other publishers whose circulation numbers are not included.

Also note that 4-Most Comics (Premium) and True Comics (Parents Magazine) are already separated out as #52 and #74 on the 1948 ranking.

Now of course, comic books were only at $0.10 cover price where almost every other magazine was at least $0.15 or more.  That changes the comparison between them and mags a bit.

If you like these kinds of numbers and comparing sales, a great web site is John Jackson Miller's The Comics Chronicle (http://www.comichron.com).  There is massive amount of data and great discussion too.

Update: John Jackson Miller does an interesting comparison of these numbers and today's comic books at his Comics Chronicle here.

Box Score 1949 prt 1

Today's artifact is a 4 page trade publication for the newsstand magazine trade.  I don't know exactly when it came out, probably in the first quarter of 1949, but it provides circulation numbers for comic books and magazines that were on the newsstand from July-December 1947 & 1948. 

There is so much here to explain that I'm going to save the actual numbers until another post.  To be able to understand what the numbers mean, you need to understand how circulation figures were obtained.

The S-M News Company, who produced this Box Score, was a national wholesaler of magazines.  One of the few alternatives to the dominant wholesaler, The American News Company, which distributed the vast majority of periodicals to newsstands in the 1940s.  S-M was considered one of the Independent distributors.  They were owned by five magazine publishers as indicated on the back cover:

Comparable circulation numbers were collected by the industry trade group called the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).  This organization accepted circulation data from publishers with supporting documentation to verify that the publishers were not just making the numbers up.  Not every publisher gave their data to the ABC, but if they took advertising for their magazines, this was the only way to have the newsstand and subscriptions sales checked.

Comic books at this time sold their advertising in blocks (Groups) of comic books, not by individual title or issue.  Since they were "all sold to kids" there wasn't a need to differentiate at this time.  Other types of magazines like fiction mags and men's mags also did this.

The comic book publisher groups reported in this issue of Box Score were:

- National Comics Group  (DC)
- Marvel Comic Group
- Fawcett Comics Group
- Quality Comic Group
- The Thrilling Comics Group   (Standard/Better)
- Lev Gleason Comic Group
- Harvey Comics Group
- Archie Comic Group
- American Comic Group  (ACG)
- Hillman Comic Group
- United Feature Comic Group
- The Premium Group of Comics  (Novelty)
- Famous Funnies-New Heroic Comics

This list is arranged in order of total circulation for the last half of 1948, with National at the top.  Names in parentheses are more common fan names of the companies.  These are the top 13 companies, but note the absence of one sure top company (Dell Comics) and others like David McKay, Fox, and Fiction House.  You can see this is not a complete list.

More details and numbers in later post.