Comics Three Months In The Future

There's one week each month in which the comic publishers release their Solicitations for whatever comics they'll be publishing three months later. This is done so that retailers can pre-order their stock in time for the publishers to print the appropriate number of copies. By getting the data out to everyone, though (Hello, Internet!), it allows readers/customers (like me) to see what's coming and potentially talk to our local comic store owners about what we want or don't want.

For December (meaning March's comic releases), this week is Marvel and DC's Solicitation window. Just for fun, I thought I'd count up how many March comics I expect to be buying from each of the Big Two publishers, compared to how many in total they're offering that might've once gotten my dollars. My criteria for that latter tally was to include any comic that starred a character that I've ever followed in the past (so, basically: the entirety of the DC and Marvel Universes, when you think about it).

Here then are the figures for March, predicting as well as I can three months ahead of time:

DC: 16 purchases out of a potential of 45
Marvel: 10 purchases out of a potential of 70

Several interesting points should jump out of those numbers:

1. Marvel's producing a lot more main-line comics in March than DC is (> 50% more, in fact)
2. While I'm planning to buy more than 1/3 of what DC's offering up, I'm only interested in a paltry 1/7 of Marvel superhero fare!
3. 26 total purchases, across 4 weeks (let's assume) represents only 6 to 7 comics per week.

As both companies experiment with $3.99 cover prices (as compared to the current norm of $2.99), I've decided to only buy comics at the higher price point if there are extra pages, or if its content is something that I genuinely would be willing to pay more money for (eg. Legion of 3 Worlds, by Johns and Perez). As such, some "event" series that I might otherwise be tempted to at least sample will instead go untouched, thanks to being saddled with a $3.99 price sticker (which, now that the Canadian dollar has dropped compared to its U.S. counterpart, actually translates to $4.75 or more).

Hopefully you found this exercise at least half as interesting as I did (or maybe twice as interesting as you'd expected, whichever is greater)!