Here are some statistics to make any modern American comics publisher weep with envy. Coming from the transcripts of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency, which under the influence of Wertham and other moral crusaders looked at the evil influence comics supposedly had on the youth of America, this is part of the testimony of Mrs. Helen Meyer, vice president of the Dell Publishing Co:
Dell’s average comic sale is 800,000 copies per issue. Most crime and horror comic sales are under 250,000 copies.
Of the first 25 largest selling magazines on newsstands – this includes Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and so forth ─ 11 titles are Dell comics, with Walt Disney’s Donald Duck the leading newsstand seller. Some of these titles are: “Walt Disney’s Comics”; “Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny”; “Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse”; “Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Porky Pigs”; “Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker”; “Margie’s Little Lulu”; “Mom’s Tom and Jerry.”
The newsstand sales range from 950,000 to 1,996,570 on each of the above mentioned titles. I mean newsstands only and I am not including any subscriptions, and we have hundreds of thousands of subscriptions.
With the least amount of titles, or 15 percent of all titles published by the entire industry; Dell can account for a sale of approximately 32 percent, and we don’t publish a crime or horror comic.
[…]
We print approximately 30 million comics a month. We sell over 25 million.
I found this site following a long breadcrumb trail of blogs, which I won’t tire y’all with. The story of how Wertham destroyed comics is well known, if perhaps as much myth as fact by now, but every history I’ve read of this focuses on the artistic impact this had on the American comics scene, with the economic impacts only of secondary importance. So these histories do mention that many publishers folded in the aftermath of the Wertham controversies and adaptation of the Comics Code, but I haven’t yet found any that really goes into detail in the ways comics published itself changed, let alone a history that put this in the wider context of the changes in (magazine) publishing in the fifties. As show above, Dell, at the time America’s biggest comics publisher could expect to sell some 800,000 copies of any given title, but how and how much did Wertham influence these nubmers? Did the comics code really do in so many publishers or was there more going on? How does all this tie in with the collapse of the independent distribution system that also took place at the time, iirc?
Anybody can recommend any good book/website that attempts to answer these sort of questions?
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