Action Comics #1000 is the first example of a trend we’ll see in the rest of the list, that is, the big anniversary blowout issue.ĭC Comics printed the 80-page giant with 11 different covers, which is par for the course with a book of its magnitude and era. Rounding out the bottom of our list are the two youngest comics on it, this one commemorating the 80th anniversary of the first superhero and the second oldest continually running superhero comic still on stands today: Superman, and Action Comics. 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. No longer working in secret, they fight publicly for the safety of mutants, to build bridges between Krakoa and human nations, and to protect the Earth and Solar System from extraterrestrial threats.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. The current iteration of the official X-Men team is headquartered in The Treehouse, a Krakoan base in New York City. Their stories have frequently involved Magneto, a powerful mutant with control over magnetic fields, who is depicted as an old friend of and foil to Xavier, variously acting as an adversary or as an ally.
In most iterations of the team, they are led by their founder Charles "Professor X" Xavier, a powerful telepath who runs a school for mutant children out of his mansion in Westchester, New York, which secretly is also the headquarters of the X-Men. The X-Men have fought against a variety of enemies, including villainous mutants, human bigots, mystical threats, extraterrestrials, and malevolent artificial intelligences. Due to their differences from the majority of humanity, mutants are subject to prejudice and discrimination and many X-Men stories feature social commentary on bigotry and justice. In the Marvel Universe, mutants are humans who are born with a genetic trait called the X-gene which grants them natural superhuman abilities. The X-Men title may refer to the superhero team itself, the eponymous comic series, or the broader franchise including various solo titles and team books such as the New Mutants, Excalibur, and X-Force. They have appeared in numerous books, television shows, the 20th Century Fox X-Men films, and video games. Although initially cancelled in 1970, following its 1975 revival and subsequent direction under writer Chris Claremont, it became one of the most recognizable and successful franchises of Marvel Comics. The X-Men are a fictional team of superheroes appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, first appearing in The X-Men #1 by artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby and writer/editor Stan Lee in 1963.
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