Batman, Inc. - The 3 Million Dollars Franchise

Last month, we saw Batman go corporate, to much critical acclaim, but corporations don't live on good reviews and word-of-mouth. No, what corporations need are profits, profits, profits! And in that case, Batman Incorporated has passed with flying colors in the first quarter of the financial year, to the tune of three million dollars that it moved in November just by selling comics. Yes, you read that right, 3,000,000 bucks. Hit the jump to see the sales numbers.

The Main Batman Titles

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In the graph above you can see all the titles that feature Batman as a protagonist (regardless of continuity or who exactly is under the mask), including Detective Comics. Together, they all add up to slightly over 2 and a half million dollars in retail sales, and almost 700k comics sold in November alone. It should be noted, however, that not all of these titles were intended to ship on the same month since DC faced some serious delays in Batman & Robin #16 and Return of Bruce Wayne #6.

The biggest mover is by far Batman: The Return. This one shot, on top of being the top selling comic of the month, it's also priced at $4.99, which makes the franchise earn almost half a million dollars alone. The next three titles are also all priced $3.99, and together they net a million dollars between them. The other ten titles round up the list and add another million between them to the count.

The Auxiliary Titles

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In addition to all the titles that Batman appears as a protagonist, there is a number of auxiliary titles with direct and definite ties to the caped crusader. These supporting Bat-titles include sidekicks, like Red Robin and Batgirl, and franchised heroes, like Batwoman and Knight & Squire. I decided to omit titles like Secret Six and Outsiders, because their connection is not as clear as the ones above, or even titles like JLA that feature Batman as a member of an ensemble. As you can see, these titles obviously do not sell as well as the main Batman titles, but together they still manage to move close to 170k copies, and net another half million to the franchise. 

The Grand Total

Together between all Batman and auxiliary titles, they add up to a total 856,692 issues sold, netting a grand total of 3,191,927 million dollars. I can imagine that the executive board of directors of Batman, Inc. will be quite happy with their sales this November.

The Fine Print

As you all probably know by now, these sales numbers are all approximate of the numbers of comics that are sold to comic book specialty stores in the United States. All numbers are obtained through the November 2010 sales reported by ICV2. The numbers above represent just the sales of single issue comics, not those of collected editions. The numbers above show the quantity of issues sold to retailers, not to actual consumers. I double checked the numbers and math, but there may still be errors. If you wish to see the spreadsheet I used to calculate the numbers above, you can click here.

Conclusion

November was a banner month for the Batman franchise, with sales unlike anything in the past couple of years, coming from a mixture of brand new series and conclusions to events. I imagine it will be quite hard for them to repeat a stunt of this magnitude.

It would also be quite interesting to see someone calculate just how big of a percentage of comics sold and money spent was just on Batman comics, but I'll leave that to someone with more patience and bigger math skills.

In the mean time, I'll leave you readers with a question: how many Batman titles did you buy in November? How much money did you spend on the franchise?

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