X-Men launch, Scott Pilgrim top comics sales in July 2010

by John Jackson Miller    

In 1991, Marvel Comics launched a new "adjectiveless" X-Men title; the original 1963 X-Men series had been known as Uncanny X-Men for several years. That new X-Men issue, with its five covers, released into the superheated speculator market of the early 1990s and became the best-selling comic book of all time, with more than 8 million copies sold — or, at least, bought by retailers. (As such, it's the least scarce issue of all time, to the dismay of any collectors back then.) That second X-Men series ran parallel to Uncanny for years, morphing later into New X-Men.

July 2010 saw the release of the third title known simply as X-Men, again with quite a few variant covers — and while it's unlikely to see anything like those numbers of 19 years ago when the final estimates are available, it did manage to take the top slot in comics shops for the month, according to data released today by Diamond Comic Distributors. You can find the July 2010 charts with market shares on Comichron here.

At this hour, Diamond has released the Top 100 trade paperbacks — dominated by Scott Pilgrim, thanks to the movie and the release of Scott Pilgrim Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour — but just the Top 10 comics so far. Full lists and estimates will be along later.