Friday, February 5, 2016

Number of Comic Books Published Each Year 1933-2014


Since no one has done much quantitative data analysis of comic books over time, I thought I would post a graph I did last year which is a comparison of three sources that I have.  There are lots of problems with the graph.

Hopefully this will get me to reactivate this blog with more stats.

Click on the image to get a larger version

To be clear, this is the number of comic book issues published each year.  Not the total quantity of comics printed or sold.  For example, Astonishing Comics from Timely had 12 issues published in 1952, numbers 9-20.  So those 12 issues are part of the approx. 3,000 issues that came out in 1952.

The yellow line is data from Dan Stevenson's year by year title listing which was provided to APA-I members years ago.  I do not believe it has been published anywhere.  It is probably the most accurate.

The orange line is data provided by John Jackson Miller on his www.comichron.com web site Research Forum in 2007.  He extracted the numbers from the Standard Catalog of Comic Books database.  I could not find the Research Forum on his ComiChron web site, so he must have taken it down.

The blue line is from Mike's Amazing World Of Comics web site from info I downloaded in Feb 2014.  The numbers have been updated since I took them, so they will be better now.  Note the trailing off of numbers after 2009.  Ignore that.  Obviously the numbers were not up to date.  Visit his excellent web site : http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/index.php.