What People Bought Last Month

I wouldn't normally draw the blogosphere's attention to something like March's comic sales rankings. But since March featured both the death of an American icon (in Captain America # 25) and the debut of Buffy Season Eight (the comic series), I figured there might be some interest.

Now, for those who've never looked at this sort of thing before, you may be disappointed at the lack of actual sales figures. In other words, you won't see how many copies of Captain America # 25 were actually sold (or printed, for that matter), but what you'll see is that it was roughly twice as many as the second-best selling comic of the month, Mighty Avengers # 1. Everything's relative to the base title, which is always Batman (thus it's always shown as having an index value of 100.0), and really what you get from this report is how the various comics that came out last month compared to each other in terms of sales.

As far as speculating on the actual totals: I imagine Cap's death sold somewhere around 250,000 to 400,000 copies, since it was almost three times what Buffy # 1 sold, and we know they printed at least 100,000 copies of her debut, from articles about it. We're just not sure how much overprint there was for Buffy # 1, which might've put it as high as 150,000. At some point in the next few weeks, we may see estimates of the actual #s, which would provide some more educated guesses than I can provide. (Comic publishers don't like to release actual circulation figures. I'm not sure why.)