The first group is of titles for which U. S. Postal Service Statement of Ownership forms were filed in late 1982. The forms were published in early 1983 in the titles' letter columns. The accompanying numbers are the average per-issue paid circulations reported in the forms. The titles are listed from the highest sellers to the lowest.
Mad 1,001,724
X-Men 313,225
Amazing Spider-Man 240,683
Fantastic Four 234,043
Avengers 223,335
Star Wars 205,179
Conan the Barbarian 197,495
Iron Man 187,564
Incredible Hulk 187,173
Daredevil 180,812 (sales at sales-year end: 233,307)
Marvel Team-Up 179,032
Spectacular Spider-Man 172,262
Dazzler 166,657
ROM 164,863
What If 160,205
Captain America 157,214
Thor 156,391
King Conan 142,346
Superman 140,006
Defenders 136,626
Justice League of America 132,569
Ka-Zar the Savage 129,938
DC Comics Presents 127,482
Legion of Super-Heroes 127,037
Savage Sword of Conan 125,307
Doctor Strange 119,651
Power Man & Iron Fist 118,020
Ghost Rider 117,769
Micronauts 117,353
Warlord 114,767
Batman 108,234
Action Comics 103,353
Spider-Woman 99,713
Superboy 96,323
Wonder Woman 96,198
Sgt. Rock 92,807
Brave and the Bold 91,097
Green Lantern 90,334
Flash 88,239
Jonah Hex 81,709
Laugh 80,209
Archie at Riverdale 77,714
House of Mystery 75,420
Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica 70,036
Vampirella 68,728
Weird War Tales 68,655
Betty and Me 68,581
Archie 67,693
Everything's Archie 67,039
Life with Archie 66,150
Archie's TV Laugh-Out 66,059
World’s Finest 65,979
Archie and Me 63,824
G. I. Combat 62,807
Jughead 59,186
The 1981-1982 sales year is when Marvel began making extended experiments with offering publications exclusively to the non-returnable "direct sales" comics-store market.
During the previous sales year, the publisher had given exclusive distribution of the first issue of the Dazzler series to comics-store accounts. Interest from collectible speculators resulted in the comic selling over 400,000 copies, which was more than 50% higher than the average monthly sales of X-Men, Marvel's top selling series for 1980-1981. In 1981-1982, three titles--Ka-Zar the Savage, Micronauts, and Moon Knight--stopped being distributed to newsstands in favor of exclusive distribution to the comics stores. While all three had healthy sales, their readership was overwhelmingly in the comics-store market. The sell-through in the newsstand was so poor that most of the print runs distributed there were unsold and being destroyed for credit. The three titles were likely being distributed to the newsstands at a loss. The limited distribution increased the titles' profitability.
Marvel also launched two new continuing series for exclusive comics-store distribution. The first was Marvel Fanfare, an anthology title intended to feature stories with Marvel characters by fan-favorite talent. The second was the Marvel Graphic Novel series. These books were in a trade-paperback format modeled after European comics albums. The books would be divided evenly between company-owned and author-owned projects. Marvel also began publishing one-shots and limited series of fan-favorite older comics in a higher-quality comic-book format. The first to be released was Star-Lord, featuring an early collaboration by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the team that doubled the sales of Marvel's X-Men and made it the field's top-selling color comic.
The sales year was also the first when fan-favorite talent clearly demonstrated that their presence on a series could significantly boost sales. In previous years, a fan-favorite talent's work on a book occasionally coincided with a sales jump, but more often than not, there was no significant increase. In 1981-1982, three titles clearly benefited from fan-favorite talent. Daredevil, with story and art by Frank Miller, saw a 39% increase from 1980-1981, a gain of, on average, over 50,000 copies per issue. At the end of the sales year, sales were 50,000 higher than that average. The sales-year's final issue sold over 230,000 copies, making Daredevil one of Marvel's top four sellers. Fantastic Four, written and drawn by John Byrne, saw an average per-issue sales increase of over 40,000 copies from the previous year. This was a sales gain of more than 20%. Finally, the presence of penciler Marshall Rogers increased the average per-issue sales of Doctor Strange by over 20,000 copies, also an increase of more than 20%.
DC's sales continued to falter. Only three titles with reported sales of more than 100,000 per issue--Justice League of America, Legion of Super-Heroes, and Warlord--saw increases, but the gains were all in the single-digit percentages. Marvel saw 21 of its 22 reported newsstand-distributed titles selling over 100,000 copies per issue, with five selling more than 200,000. (X-Men, Marvel's top-selling title, had average sales of more than 300,000.) DC had no titles with average reported sales of more than 150,000 copies, and only six with more than 100,000. One notes that this does not take into account the sales of New Teen Titans, which was reputedly DC's most popular title. No Statement of Ownership for the series was filed for the 1981-1982 sales year.
The following group are titles that had 20 or more issues published by early 1983, but had no Statement of Ownership filed in 1982. Publishers often did not file the form for titles that had not published at least 20 issues when forms were due to be submitted, so those are not listed. Titles that were published during the sales year, but were cancelled before the Statement of Ownership could be printed, are not listed, either.
All-Star Squadron
Arak, Son of Thunder
Marvel Tales
Marvel Two-in-One
Master of Kung Fu
Moon Knight
New Teen Titans
Pep
Other Comics Sales Posts
--1969-1970
--1970-1971
--1971-1972
--1972-1973
--1973-1974
--1974-1975
--1975-1976
--1976-1977
--1977-1978
--1978-1979
--1979-1980
--1980-1981
--1982-1983
--1983-1984
--1984-1985
--1985-1986
--1986-1987
--1987-1988
--1988-1989
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