Bam Smack Pow
Fansided

Marvel Confirms Star Wars #1 To Sell 1 Million Copies With Help Of New Outlets

By Nick Tylwalk

facebooktwitterreddit

Marvel has confirmed that Star Wars #1 will sell more than one million copies at the wholesale level, telling Comicbook.com that earlier reports making that claim were correct. It will be the first regular issue of any comic book to hit that mark in more than 20 years.

More from Comics

While an impressive number and undoubtedly good news for Marvel and anyone who likes to see the comics industry thrive, there are additional forces (no pun intended) at work here. Two factors we also suspected would be involved in juicing the sales numbers, a heavy push behind multiple variant covers and alternate means of getting the issue into people’s hands, were also verified during the interview.

Let’s deal with the variants first. There will be a ton of them, more than 30 when retailer and convention exclusives are taken into account. Though Marvel Publishing Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing David Gabriel assured Comicbook.com that even the standard cover alone would beat the highest debut issue from 2014, the unusually large number of variant covers are going to play into the comic’s seven-digit total.

Even more interesting is what people are calling the “Loot Crate effect,” where some comics in 2014 got a huge boost from partnering with the subscription geek swag service and were shipped to all of the company’s estimated 100,000 customers. Marvel hasn’t announced a similar partnership for Star Wars #1, but Gabriel did say that something similar was definitely in the works besides simply selling the issue in comic stores:

"There are a number of new outlets that we’re working with here in terms of the folks purchasing and selling a large number of exclusive covers, which in the end means that this very large number of comics will be sold in places where we haven’t necessarily had comic sales."

What does that mean, exactly? We won’t know until Marvel fills in the blanks, which may not happen until we get closer to the on-sale date of January 14. Knowing that these “new outlets” are in the picture will guarantee that some people will want to put an asterisk by the figures posted by Star Wars #1, and maybe that’s fitting. But a million is a million either way, and if you enjoy the art form, it shouldn’t matter how this issue gets there, as just having it read by people who wouldn’t normally check it out is a win for the comics industry.

More from Bam Smack Pow

Home/Comics