The first group is of titles for which U. S. Postal Service Statement of Ownership forms were filed in late 1981. The forms were published in early 1982 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.
Estimates are provided for select titles that did not publish a Statement of Ownership in early 1981. The estimate number is a rounded average of the title's sales from 1979-1980 and 1981-1982.
Titles with an asterisk by their numbers were new-series launches. The first issues of new series were often targeted by collectible speculators, and the outsize sales enjoyed by the first issues exaggerate the popularity of the books when looking at the average paid-circulation numbers. With new series, the number given is the sales of the most recent issue at the time of the Statement of Ownership filing.
Mad 1,094,085
X-Men 259,607
Amazing Spider-Man 242,781
Star Wars 229,901
Avengers 221,394
Incredible Hulk 201,497
Fantastic Four 192,731
Dazzler 187,941*
Ka-Zar the Savage 186,920*
Marvel Team-Up 185,818
Conan the Barbarian 184,448
Iron Man 177,520
Spectacular Spider-Man 171,839
Thor 167,915
King Conan 166,044
Captain America 159,647
Moon Knight 156,323*
Superman 148,637
ROM 147,439
Micronauts 132,768
Daredevil 130,239
DC Comics Presents 127,526
Defenders 124,985
Justice League of America 121,714
Ghost Rider 121,227
Master of Kung Fu 120,000 (est.)
Legion of Super-Heroes 117,038
Action Comics 111,729
Batman 110,997
Savage Sword of Conan 110,683
Warlord 109,389
Power Man & Iron Fist 106,168
Sgt. Rock 103,727
Superboy 103,272
Spider-Woman 102,474
Doctor Strange 98,255
Brave and the Bold 92,974
Flash 92,151
Green Lantern 91,321
Unknown Soldier 91,151
Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica 90,586
Detective Comics 89,710
Ghosts 87,664
Archie 87,302
House of Mystery 87,089
Jonah Hex 85,045
Life with Archie 84,886
Wonder Woman 83,796
Unexpected 83,371
Archie's Pals 'n' Gals 82,747
Weird War Tales 80,616
Laugh 80,209
Archie and Me 79,639
Betty and Me 78,607
Jughead 77,812
Archie at Riverdale High 77,714
Pep 77,223
Everything's Archie 76,698
World’s Finest 73,602
Little Archie 73,289
Vampirella 71,923
Jughead's Jokes 71,649
G. I. Combat 69,353
Superman Family 68,688
This is the year when Marvel's X-Men became the field's top-selling color title. Most of the sales year featured the last issues of the John Byrne-Chris Claremont run. It's not clear if X-Men became the top-seller before or after Byrne's departure, but the momentum generated by the issues he and Claremont did was what put it over. Claremont continued with the series, with sales continuing to rise over the next few years.
During the 1981-1982 sales year Marvel's Ka-Zar the Savage, Micronauts, and Moon Knight were moved to exclusive non-returnable "direct sales" distribution in the comics-store market. Comics lore has it that this was done in order to avoid canceling the books for low sales. The Statement of Ownership information shows this to be a misunderstanding of the situation. All three titles, as can be seen above, sold fairly well. The problem Marvel was addressing was that the overwhelming majority of the sales was in the comics-store market. The sell-through in the newsstand market, where vendors returned unsold comics to distributors, who ostensibly destroyed the inventory for credit, was very poor. The returns situation meant it wasn't worthwhile to distribute the books there.
The sales of DC's newsstand offerings continued their decline. Just nine titles reported average sales of more than 100,000 copies. Only one, Warlord, saw a significant sales increase. No books sold more than 150,000 per issue. This does not take into consideration New Teen Titans. This title debuted during the 1980-1981 sales year, and it is reputed to be DC's top-seller during the first half of the 1980s. No Statement of Ownership for the series would be filed until late 1985.
Sales at Archie Comics continued to fall. The line's top-selling title is Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica for the second year in a row.
The following group are titles that had 20 or more issues published by early 1982, but had no Statement of Ownership filed in 1981. 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 Statements of Ownership could be published, are not listed, either.
Marvel Tales
Marvel Two-in-One
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
--1981-1982
--1982-1983
--1983-1984
--1984-1985
--1985-1986
--1986-1987
--1987-1988
--1988-1989
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