DC New 52, Six Months In

DC's "New 52" relaunch in September 2011 was an unqualified success. A massive gain in sales over August 2011, sell-outs of every #1 issue, retailers across the country seeing new and lapsed customers driven in to their stores by the new jumping on points... it was a really exciting time for DC. The one note of caution, though, was how sustainable this kind of response would be. How long would people check out 52 new series? How would DC's sales look next month? Or six months down the line?

We've been wondering that, as well. This week, it'll have been seven months since DC's relaunch, which means we'll have a month's worth of sales for every issue. That's enough to give a bit of analysis and see where DC is at Challengers, six months into the New 52.

METHODOLOGY

We collated one month's worth of sales data for each issue's first printing. That's four week's of SALES. Held issues that weren't picked up within the first four weeks of release were not counted, nor were any rack sales beyond the fourth week. The reason for this was to keep an even, constant amount of sales data per issue. Otherwise, early issues might have a disproportionally high amount of sales due to simply having longer to sell. We might've been able to solve this by giving every issue more than a month of data on our chart, but then how long might be fair? Six weeks? Two months? Three? We decided to cap it at one month for the reasons listed above, but also to allow us to start interpreting the first six months before month nine or ten or however long it'd take to compile a list. We'd like to examine this data while it's still somewhat fresh.

We also decided to only track first prints for largely the same reasons as the time limit: a month snapshot is, we feel, sufficient for our purposes, and most reprints would be available in the second or third months of an issue's release.

It's maybe worth restating that all data is taken from Challengers ONLY. This is merely how the New 52 have performed at CHALLENGERS.

SIX MONTHS AND CHANGE

Here's an alphabetical list of New 52 titles, with the percentage change between in #1 sales and #6 sales. A positive change means MORE copies of #6 were sold than #1, a negative change means LESS copies of #6 were sold than #1:

Action Comics -59.72%

All Star Western -56.41%

Animal Man -3.51%

Aquaman -62.96%

Batgirl -55.38%

Batman -4.35%

Batman and Robin -21.82%

Batman The Dark Knight -28.30%

Batwing -57.89%

Batwoman -42.55%

Birds of Prey -46.15%

Blackhawks -81.82%

Blue Beete -91.67%

Captain Atom -90.00%

Catwoman -59.46%

DC Universe Presents -70.83%

Deathstroke -81.63%

Demon Knights -55.81%

Detective Comics 4.35%

Flash -43.55%

Frankenstein -55.26%

Fury of Firestorm -80.00%

Green Arrow -80.00%

Green Lantern -46.67%

Green Lantern Corps -47.62%

Green Lantern New Guardians -60.78%

Grifter -79.31%

Hawk and Dove -86.36%

I Vampire -66.67%

Justice League -45.56%

Justice League Dark -48.08%

Justice League International -53.57%

Legion Lost -85.71%

Legion of Super-Heroes -83.33%

Men of War -82.35%

Mister Terrific -100.00%

Nightwing -53.33%

OMAC -66.67%

Red Hood and the Outlaws -71.43%

Red Lanterns -65.96%

Resurrection Man -54.55%

Savage Hawkman -78.57%

Static Shock -100.00%

Stormwatch -73.33%

Suicide Squad -42.86%

Superboy -59.26%

Supergirl -61.11%

Superman -79.41%

Swamp Thing 17.02%

Teen Titans -67.44%

Voodoo -76.00%

Wonder Woman -47.87%