Hello, Redditors! John Jackson Miller here, founder of the Comichron website, a resource for comics research.
You may also know me from my Star Wars and Star Trek novels -- or from my comics writing on titles including Star Wars, Iron Man, Halo, Mass Efect, and The Simpsons. You can read more about that over on my Faraway Press site, where I have behind-the-scenes pages on everything I've ever done -- but I'm here today because March is Comichron.com's tenth anniversary, and as Reddit is one of our top sources of traffic, I wanted to offer the opportunity for folks to pose whatever questions they might have about the numbers side of the industry, past or present.
As a teenage collector, I started keeping records of my comics collection to keep track of what I had; later on, I became editor of Comics Retailer, the trade magazine for the comics industry, which I ran -- as well as working on its sister title, Comics Buyer's Guide, for a decade. It was in that period that I started tracking the industry's sales both monthly and also going backwards into the past; for the last ten years, I've continued that work on Comichron, maintaining it so the data won't be lost.
You're probably most familiar with our monthly reports; the preliminary sales report for Feburary 2017 comics sales just went online today, and on Monday you'll see our estimates. We've recently redesigned our estimates pages so they're searchable and sortable by column; you can see that at work in the January 2017 charts. We're slowly retrofitting earlier pages with that capability; we have monthly tables going all the way back to 1995.
I also have many other datasets, including cover prices across time and nearly all the Statements of Ownership reporting comics sales all the way back to 1960; you can see how detailed that material gets here. I have a huge amount of 1960-present material that I'll be updating the site with regularly starting this month.
Finally, I try where possible to offer historical perspective. Having lived through and reported on the 1990s boom and bust, I tend to be more measured in how I react to the ups and downs in the marketplace; as Will Eisner said, the comics industry has nearly died three times. We've come back each time, inventing something that saved us (although as I've written elsewhere, often the thing that saved comics the last time gets us in trouble the next time). I tend to emphasize the horse-race aspects a lot less than other analysts; in general, that's because my role really is as more of an archivist saving and interpreting information. The real competition comics is in is with other entertainment forms. Our real race is against past performance, so we can keep making and reading comics.
With that, the floor is open for questions!
Reddit-Ask Me Anything w/Comicron's JJM
Moderator: JohnMayo
Reddit-Ask Me Anything w/Comicron's JJM
Reddit had an Ask Me Anything last Friday with Comicron's John Jackson Miller in case you missed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/com ... on_miller/
Comics For Fun and Profit(also available on iTunes and Stitcher)