Half a Million Copies

This won't be a long post.

The initial figures are in, and it seems that the return of Peter Parker to the pages of Spider-Man is quite highly anticipated, by comic book retailers at the very least. Orders for April's The Amazing Spider-Man #1 are estimated at over 500,000 copies (close to 600,000, actually). This is the most copies sold of any single issue since 2009's The Amazing Spider-Man #583, which featured a then newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama on the cover. These figures have, without a doubt, been inflated somewhat by the usual practice of offering variant covers as incentives to retailers, but it is still undoubtedly impressive.

 I find myself chuckling at the thought of Peter's return generating such gargantuan sales considering that, prior to his "death" and replacement by Otto Octavius at the end of issue #700 of The Amazing Spider-Man, the title was averaging sales in the high 50,000s, with the occasional spike in sales due to some "event" storyline (or, as in the case of the Obama issue, a once-in-a-lifetime gimmick). For the thirty issues that Otto has been in charge, the flagship Spider-Man book, Superior Spider-Man, has never sold fewer than 75,000 copies in the United States. People liked the new direction.

Still, it apparently wasn't easy for writer Dan Slott, who actually received death threats, apart from the expected hate mail, over Peter's "death" back in 2012. He and Marvel must be heaving huge sighs of relief that their new series is off to such an "amazing" start.

Of course, it remains to be seen if the retailers' zeal is reflective of what their customers want, and even assuming they've got it right, it also remains to be seen what kind of long-term sales this new story direction can sustain. After all, gimmick-free, variant-cover-free Peter, back when he was still married and being written by J. Michael Straczynski, was regularly selling over 100,000 copies on the average, the kind of numbers publishers would probably kill for nowadays, but post "Brand New Day" Peter couldn't regularly sell much more than half that amount, barring the odd spike every so often due to "event" storylines.

Assuming Marvel have gotten it right and this new Amazing Spider-Man sustains, if not improves upon the monthly sales of Superior Spider-Man, I will definitely find it funny that to get people to read about Peter Parker's adventures, Marvel actually had to keep him out of his own title for over a year.