With that in mind, here are the 10 best-selling American single-issue comic books, according to the most concrete numbers in the industry’s spotty history. We also owe a grudging debt to Diamond Comics distributors, for the company’s monopolistic takeover of the American comic book shipping market, and its regular reporting of comic book pre-order sales ever since. Our research owes a lot to Comichron’s detailed compilations of the categories of best-selling comics the site’s post about the difficulties of naming the “best-selling comics ever” is good and edifying reading. You wind up with a list more like “The 10 best-selling American single-issue comic books of all time that we have hard data on.” If you want to base everything on confirmed numbers, you’ve got to throw in quite a few caveats. And that’s without considering the apples to oranges comparison of America’s single issues method of distribution to, say, Japan’s doorstop-like weekly anthology magazines. There are decades of comics history where industry number-crunchers only counted how many issues of Superman and Captain America newsstands ordered, leaving historians with only hard sales numbers from 1997 onward. When it comes to determining the exact rundown of the best-selling comics of all time, the data is murky. There’s some set up for the future, and it will be interesting to see where this book goes.In 1991, X-Men #1 sold an estimated 8,186,500 copies, making it a likely contender for the best-selling single-issue comic book in history. It’s hard to say if a superhero X-Men book is the right way to go after two years of anything but, however, Duggan, Larraz, and Gracia deliver an entertaining story that hits all the right points. The new Treehouse headquarters looks amazing. ![]() There’s a giant mech fight between an X-Men improvised mech and an alien one. Larraz and Gracia are the X-Men art team supreme, and this book is yet another example of why. ![]() One thing that can’t be denied is that this comic looks amazing. Is this book going to work with stuff from the others? Is it going to set up things for the future, or is it just going to be cool superhero stuff? There’s a lot riding on this comic, and honestly, even if one isn’t entirely down for the X-Men as superheroes, it will still be fun just to see where it all goes- X-Men as people watching, basically. It’ll be interesting to see how things in this book work with the rest of what’s going on with Krakoa. In fact, it looks like things are going to shape up well in this book. There are no indications that this will be a bad book- Duggan is a good writer. Duggan does a great job of setting up interesting new threats for the team right off the bat in this issue, the team works well together, and there are a lot of intriguing plot points. Well, it depends on how much one wants to read a straight superhero X-Men book. ![]() He’s doing cool superhero stuff, which is fine, but in this Krakoan status quo, is this really what anyone should be doing? The whole point of Dawn of X was to create a new X-Men experience, and, for better and worse, it did. Duggan isn’t reinventing any wheels with this one. Hickman’s X-Men may have spun its wheels a lot, but the wheels it was spinning were wheels it had reinvented. It felt weird then- Marvel jettisoning Morrison’s revolutionary ideas so Whedon could pretend to be a feminist and write Claremont-style X-Men stuff- and feels weird now. It feels like Duggan, Hickman, and everyone else involved in brainstorming this idea is channeling Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men- making the X-Men superheroes again after Morrison made them into something completely different. On the one hand, it could just be a PR move- mutants have just claimed Mars, everyone is mad at them, and putting a mutant superhero team in the home of superhero teams “humanizes” them, for lack of a better word.
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