Roughly How Many Units of A Typical Silver Age Book Would Have Been Produced? 0

[Collectr]

Hopefully someone could help me out in answering "How many units of a particular comic issue would typically have been produced during the silver age?"

Yes, it's a vague question. Did DC or Marvel ever release their mintage stats from the silver age? Does anyone have any educated guesses on how many would have been produced for the major lines like Batman/Superman for instance? 

100,000?  200,000?

Thanks in advance for comments.

[marvelmaniac]

Since comic books in the 50's/60's were disposable entertainment for "kids" you then have to ask how many did Mom's across America throw out???

[Mercury Man]

I think I read somewhere once that most Marvel and DC's hovered in the 250,000-500,000 range.   The better selling titles on the higher end of that spectrum (ASM for example). 

[Jaylam]

Found this. 

http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata/1960.html

[Unca Ben]

When I happen upon one of those Statements of Ownership in a silver age Marvel, it always amazes me as to the number of books that were listed under "Office Use, Left-Over, Unaccounted, Spoiled after Printing".  

[SECollector]

Here is an interesting list of 600 different first appearances and their print runs:

http://www.hoknescomics.com/firstappearance.htm

[Lazyboy]

5 hours ago, SECollector said:

Here is an interesting list of 600 different first appearances and their print runs:

http://www.hoknescomics.com/firstappearance.htm

I'm not sure which is worse; the list, or Hoknes' understanding of what "print run" means.

[SECollector]

8 hours ago, Lazyboy said:

I'm not sure which is worse; the list, or Hoknes' understanding of what "print run" means.

Can you explain what is wrong with it?

[Lazyboy]

9 hours ago, SECollector said:

Can you explain what is wrong with it?

The list is very inconsistent and contains characters that probably shouldn't be on a Top 6000 list.

The numbers are clearly mostly derived from distribution averages (which are absolutely not print runs) from Statements of Ownership and/or sites like Comichron and aren't even all marked as estimates.

[valiantman]

On 12/8/2018 at 8:58 AM, Jaylam said:

Found this. 

http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata/1960.html

There's more than just 1960 on that site: http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata.html

 

[Jaylam]

15 minutes ago, valiantman said:

There's more than just 1960 on that site: http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata.html

 

Very interesting data. It looks like overall through the 60's comic book sales were falling off. One thing that always puzzled me was Marvel's decision to cancel the X-Men in 1970, citing poor sales, but according to this, the title was selling almost on par with other Marvel titles that were kept going, and was out-selling many DC mainstays.