Hi Christopher. Yes, you're correct that these...

2010-01-05T10:07:38.738-06:00

Hi Christopher. Yes, you're correct that these figures are not direct market comics shops -- most of Shonen Jump's sales are on newsstands and through subscriptions, which places the majority of its sales outside the purview of this list. There's no easy way to confirm the additional sales on any individual issue of most comics through newsstands and subscriptions, though we can see them in averages for the entire year through Statements of Ownership.

Shonen Jump did file a Statement in 2003, which reported average monthly sales at 150,961 copies; the average figure in 2004, which possibly could have included the figures for 2003's September issue with the Yu-Gi-Oh Power of Chaos CD-ROM, was 193,921 copies.

It's not clear to me where Milton at ICV2 got the 540,000 copy figure, but it wouldn't have been the final number, as returns probably wouldn't have all come back from the newsstand outlets by then. (That's why we always look at the average figures for the year, rather than single-issue ones on the Statements of Ownership.) The publisher itself wouldn't have known final sales by the time the story ran; the real figure would have been lower, although probably not a whole lot lower.

In any event, you're correct that while Shonen Jump is not to be found on a list of the decade's top-sellers where most comic books in North America are sold, its newsstand and subscription sales would place it highly on a list of sellers that included all single-copy markets. How highly? I think the CD-ROM issue would likely be very highly ranked indeed -- though probably not #1, since the Obama Spider-Man had newsstand sales of its own, including at least one additional printing for the newsstand. We don't have a good way of knowing what that figure is, but I would imagine it takes the book north of 600,000 copies.

John, Thanks for posting this. I don't know h...

2010-01-05T00:51:13.638-06:00

John,

Thanks for posting this. I don't know how ICv2 verifies their data, but this report from November 2003 has Shonen Jump #9 hitting 540,000 copies in sales:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/3867.html

And Shonen Jump averages 200,000+ sales every month. It's not "just through direct market comic shops", but those are verified numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shonen_Jump_(magazine)

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Hi Christopher. Yes, you're correct that these...

John, Thanks for posting this. I don't know h...