Marvel Digital Comics: Tales of The Black Freighter

I’m guessing that Marvel’s been feeling a little left out by all the publicity surrounding DC Comic’s New 52 and their decision to make all their comics available for digital sale the same day as print, because late Friday afternoon Marvel issued a press release announcing that Ultimate Spider-Man, one of the few comics that Marvel DOES offer for sale the same day as print, had “the best first day of sales for a new release to date!” on their iPhone and iPad apps.

Awesome! How many copies did you sell, writer Brian Michael Bendis?

Nothing frustrates an author more than his work not being able to get into the hands of the people that want it, and now with the Marvel Comics app we can!

Okay… how many people got their hands on it digitally? You: Marvel SVP of Sales David Gabriel – how many?

We’ve been pushing to make Ultimate Comics Spider-Man our top release to date, and the results we’ve seen both here and in print certainly show us that we’re heading in the right direction.

For the love of – Why won’t you just tell us how many digital copies you’re selling, Marvel and DC? What are you so worried about?

DC Comics’ Electric Dreams

This morning on the Source Blog, DC Comics announced that Justice League #1 and Action Comics #1 have each sold through more than 200,000 copies in less than two weeks and one week respectively, and that Justice League #1 is now officially the biggest selling American comic book of 2011 so far… they key word being AMERICAN. The biggest selling JAPANESE comic being, of course, the million copy selling Tentacle Panty Sniff Party by Kuroda Masato, the biggest name in Manga that I just made up.

In all seriousness, them’s big numbers for DC, and not the only ones: every New 52 book DC released last week is going back for a second printing, and other than Action and Justice League, DC’s got eight other books with sellthrough of more than 100,000 copies.

Which is exciting news for DC Comics and for comics enthusiasts in general; God knows my Local Comic Store Owner – who knows me by name and asks me if I should maybe be eating better or if instead something crawled up my asshole and died – was positively giddy when he confirmed to me last Wednesday that I was FAR from the only customer who asked him to pull all 52 of the new DC books.

And even MORE exciting is that those numbers only count the actual print run; they don’t include numbers from DC’s other big innovation – making every book they sell available for sale digitally the same day they’re available in print! And when you add THOSE numbers in, well… I’ll let John Rood, DC’s Executive VP of Sales, Marketing and Business Development tell you: lay ’em on us, Johnny!

We can’t.

Um… what was that?