Marvel’s new Star Wars comic is selling like hotcakes and just entered into its third printing.
You may recall last month when reports from both the media and Marvel emerged, pegging the first issue of the new Star Wars comic as being a potential million plus seller, something almost unheard of in the modern comic book industry. Well, issue one has been on store shelves for two weeks now and Marvel, speaking to The Escapist, has confirmed that the book has surpassed even those optimistic sales predictions.
While the publisher wasn’t able to say exactly how many copies the comic had sold to date, it stated that it had easily gone beyond the one million the company had predicted it would sell. “Thanks to the strong support of the Direct Market comic shops and a few new outlets we have well surpassed 1 million copies of Star Wars #1,” said David Gabriel, Senior Vice President of Print & Digital Publishing at Marvel. “The book continues to sell and is now going into its third printing.” Gabriel would go on to describe the comic’s success as “a testament to the quality of the book, the talent of our creators and the ingenious aptitude of our editorial team.”
Just speaking personally, I’m not at all surprised by the success of Star Wars #1. Setting aside the fact that it represented a gigantic franchise switching comic publishers after two decades, Marvel did a lot to help position it as a gigantic seller. For one, it gave the book to writer Jason Aaron, one of the best regarded writers in the industry right now. More importantly though, it intentionally created dozens of variant covers, giving fans and collectors incentive to buy multiple copies. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that it was also a really good book. As much as its early numbers might owe to variant covers, its continued sales probably have something to do with it being an excellent recreation of the Star Wars universe as envisioned in the original trilogy.
